A Comparative Study on the Fitness to the Aged between Traditional Residential Communities and Modern High-rise Communities Based on the Analysis of Environment-Behavior Coupling Degree ——Take Suzhou as an example

As a famous historical and cultural city in China, the ancient city of Suzhou has large numbers of well-preserved traditional residential building communities. However, like most historical and cultural cities in China, the ancient city of Suzhou is currently facing a serious population aging problem. In the sixth census in 2010, the proportion of the elderly over 65 years old accounted for 17.4%, far higher than Suzhou’s average rate 8.5%. In recent years, the proportion of the elderly population has shown an upward trend. The Suzhou government believes that the proportion of the elderly population remains high, resulting in a decline in the proportion of the labor force in the ancient city, which further affects the economic development and vitality of the ancient city. Therefore, the local government intends to relieve some of the elderly population through policy measures. However, the ultra-large spatial scale and standardized facility configuration of modernized communities in China at this stage pose challenges to the daily travel behavior of the elderly. Since the public space of the community carries the behavioral activities of individuals, there is an interactive relationship between behavior and space. From the perspective of the elderly, based on the analysis of space-behavior coupling degree, this paper measures the health level of daily life space from the aspects of diversity, accessibility, and participation, and adopts survival behavior, family behavior, spontaneous behavior and group behavior to measure the behavior diversity of the elderly, and builds a space-behavior coupling evaluation index system to quantify and evaluate the interaction between the behavior of the elderly and the public space, which reflects the difference in the suitability of the two types of communities. The research result indicates that the traditional residential communities in the ancient city have higher coupling and coordination, and are more suitable for the elderly to live in, providing a basis for the aged spend their old age still in the ancient city.