Niche Fitness Model For The Quantitative Evaluation Of The Environmental Quality Of The Urban Human Settlement

The city is the most dense and abundant human settlements. As the urbanization, two-thirds of the population in the world is predicted to settle in the city in 2025. urbanization bring people creature comfort, convenient infrastructure for daily life and efficient communication of information with the problem of human settlement deterioration such as environmental pollution, traffic congestions and housing crunches and so on. Therefore, the study of quality of urban human settlement is meaningful.The evaluation of quality of human settlement in favor of improvement the recognition of the change of quality of human settlement for people, make sure the healthy development of the human settlement. On the basis of the summary of the former researches, the paper include the following aspects:(1) Systematically introduces the context and the development of the theory and practice of human settlement;and sums up the present situations and methods of evaluation of quality of urban human settlement.(2) On the basis of macroscopical theory of human settlement, the study chooses urban scale as the research level, establishing the index system of the quantitative evaluation of the environmental quality of the urban human settlement. The index system falls into four basic parts: object level, system level, factor level and indicator level. Thirty-five indicators are chosen from economy advancement aspect, social improvement aspect and ecological environment aspect.(3) The study introduce the niche fitness theory into the quantitative evaluation of the environment quality of the urban human settlement, establishing the niche fitness model for the quantitative evaluation of the environment quality of the urban human settlement, with several monomial indexes which reflect the coupling component between realistic niches and the best niches selected to constitute 3 independent indexes of evaluation.(4) As a case, the model on the premise that the idiographic index system is established is applied to evaluate the environmental quality of the urban human settlement of 9 cities of Zhejiang Province. The results show that the economic niche fitness values of the northern cities(Hangzhou, Ningbo Jiaxing Shaoxing and Huzhou >0.44) are higher than those of thesouthern cities in the province(Jinhua, Wenzhou, Taizhou and Lishui <0.41). with Hangzhou and Ningbo on the top place;The social niche fitness values of Hangzhou and Ningbo(>0.71) are better than those of other cities(0.42—0.51) which are close;The environmental niche fitness values of Jiaxing is the best(about0.98), Wenzhou is worst(about0.36), and those of other cities are near(0.53-0.65). The comprehensive niche-fitness values of the north-central cities and the northern cities(Hangzhou, Ningbo Jiaxing >0. 67) are bigger than those of the central cities and the northern cities(Shaoxing, Huzhou, Jinhua 0.47 — 0.50), which are bigger than those of the central cities and the southern cities in the province(Lishui, Taizhou and Wenzhou <0.47), with Hangzhou best and Wenzhou worst. In addition, the gradation of the indexes of evaluation which influence the comprehensive niche-fitness values of the 9 cities of Zhejiang Province in 2004 is economic niche, environmental niche and social niche, which indicates the regional difference of those factors.The result shows that this model was scientific and effective for the quantitative evaluation of the environmental quality of the urban human settlement.