Abstract
The urban-rural dual structure system had a profound impact on the equal supply of public resources in China. In previous studies, much discussion has been made on the configuration of public service facilities in urban area. Moreover, current technical standards on public service facility configuration pay much focus on quality and quantity, with very rare focus drawn on accessibility of public service facilities especially in rural areas. Taken Huating Town, Shanghai, China as an example, this study took an accessibility perspective to evaluate the current locations of 3 kinds of rural public service facilities including elderly activity rooms, clinics and outdoor fitness places, which are strongly related to the health and happiness index of residents. The analysis results show that:（1）Huating town occupies rich agricultural space, thus numerous small-scale rural settlements are sparsely distributed among the farmland. Except for the clinic, other two are distributed unevenly and there is no correlation between the amount of facilities and the villages` population or number of rural settlements. (2) These three types of facilities are mainly located near the local administrative center, it is poorly accessible for residents who live far away especially in those towns with large administrative area. (3) Residents may tend to use the nearest public service facilities as long as they can use them with no restriction of administrative divisions. Therefore, highly frequent cross-administrative usage of service facilities has caused significant disparity in terms of service pressure. On this basis, this study applied the distance cost principle to build an optimal facility allocation model, and thus optimizing the spatial layout of three types of rural public service facilities in Huating Town. The research contributes to the expanding literature of public service facilities distribution, and the results fill some of gaps on the allocation of public service facilities in rural area from the perspective of accessibility. Moreover, compared to the traditional measure (evaluated with Euclidean distance), we considered a more scientific measurement with real distance data provided by online web providers. In the end, the results may provide some guidance for improving the living conditions of rural residents and narrowing the gap between urban and rural development in China.
