Prioritizing Micro-Scale Urban Renewal Through Behavioral Tracking and Participatory Mapping of Community Public...

The effective renewal of community public spaces requires an integrated understanding of physical conditions and user experiences. However, conventional assessment approaches often separate behavioral observation from user perception. This protocol presents a mixed-methods framework for evaluating community public spaces by combining observed usage patterns, perceived environmental quality, and place-specific spatial feedback. The workflow includes physical site audits, repeated pedestrian observations, trajectory tracing, intercept surveys, and participatory mapping. These data streams are integrated within a weighted multi-criteria evaluation (MCE) framework to determine site-specific renewal priorities. To demonstrate the protocol, eight neighborhood public spaces were evaluated, generating 336 observation blocks, 240 intercept surveys, and 96 coded micro-spatial units. Behavioral indicators, including pedestrian count and trajectory complexity, were analyzed alongside subjective measures such as comfort and perceived safety. The representative findings demonstrate that renewal urgency cannot be determined by physical deterioration alone. Instead, high-priority sites were characterized by the convergence of intensive routine use, low perceived quality, and concentrated negative spatial feedback. This protocol provides urban researchers and planners with a reproducible and spatially grounded method for diagnosing public-space deficits and prioritizing targeted urban-renewal interventions.