GIS-Based Sustainable Accessibility Mapping of Urban Parks: Evidence from the Second Largest Settlement of Sindh, Pakistan

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report (New Reviewer)

(Major comments)

This study is addressing lack of urban parks and developing the approach to assessing the sufficiency of parks for each district in Pakistan. This is significant to plan urban area for the purpose of pursuing quality life. Also, authors tried to combine two different methods, spatial analysis and questionnaire survey to solve the problem derived from the physical distribution of parks using users’ satisfaction and requirements.
However, the overall analysis is listing of fragments of information, and therefore does not provide with thoughtful insight or implementation from the findings in this study.
Some information is repeated over the text.
Some sentences are not complete, and/or do not deliver the clear meaning.
Most of the captions of tables and figures need more details.
Rules for the citation should be checked carefully.
English through the whole text should be revised by a native speaker.

(Detailed comments)
- Line numbers should be consistently presented through the whole text.
- “1.1 Research contribution” need not have the heading.
- The table of literature review is not necessary but it is significant for the content to be explained in the text.
- In the methodology, selecting the study topic should not be included. That should be explained in the research purpose in the introduction.
In this study, the diagram of methodology can be the form which depicts the relation of input data, data processing and outcome.
- The number of tables should be checked.
- Figure 10 is different to Table 11 and they are the same thing in substance.
- The results from the spatial analysis are so simple and can be easily inferred without the use of buffer analysis.
- Findings from the questionnaire survey should be more integrated with the spatial analysis.

Author Response

The authors are thankful to the respected reviewer for the valuable comments. Please see the attached report and corrected manuscript. The authors tried their level best to comply with the comments of the respected reviewer. The authors are very much confident about their manuscript. Thanks.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report (New Reviewer)

1) The principles and theory behind GIS-based Sustainable Accessibility Mapping should be explained in 100 words.

2) The NOVELTY of this work should be stated in 5 sentences.

3) Give good examples of potential advantages of active and healthy lifestyles with relation to your home country.

4) How can the comfort of reaching desired locations be achieved with respect to space and time. Give your opinions.

5) What are the key results achieved in Four Belgian cities'. Give good details.

6) Write the quality assurance of the samples during surveys, field observations, and interviews + stat analysis.

7) Tables = align all the text to the left side.

8) The results related to Service area and Service Population ratio should be compared with other results (REF) from developing countries. 

9) Discussion should be improved on the following aspects, with REF support:

a)  amenity service

b) main roadways and the residential areas

c) Park spaces, green areas and recreation facilities

d) Feedback of the results to the respondents

10) Within all the graphs, most of the text size is TOO SMALL. Can the authors check the source files and increase the text SIZE.

11) Combine some Figures as a, b c and reduce the number of figures to just 6.

12) Check the grammar and spacing mistakes in the document.

13) Figure 10:

X and Y axis line = black colour

Font = Arial

Remove the box type outside border

 

Author Response

The authors are so grateful to respected reviewers for the valuable comments. The authors have made certain modifications that upgraded the quality of the manuscript. Please refer to the corrected manuscript and authors response report. Thank you very much.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report (New Reviewer)

This paper analyzes the accessibility of urban parks based on gis, which is a good paper. Some comments are as follows:

(1) Can you simplify the second part?

(2) 3.2 It is suggested to delete the first and second parts, I think i. the selection of the study topic and the identification of the problem. ii. the detailed review of previous research. These two should be excluded from the methodology part.

Author Response

The authors really appreciate the comments of the respected reviewer. The compliance has been made in this regard. Please refer to corrected manuscript and authors report. At the end, the authors thank the respected reviewer. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report (New Reviewer)

Please see the attached. 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear Reviewer

First of all, I want to thank you for your valuable suggestions to improve the draft of the manuscript. We tried our best to address each of your suggestion at our best. Please find a separate response sheet in the attachment. 

Dear sir, this paper processes a method to access the fitness of the existing land use facilities using GIS. to test the methodology, a case study was conducted to access the method using different buffer distances aligned with the codes of the area. This method proposed in this study can be extended to any other land use facilities like park is taken as a facility in this study. It can be modified as per any other facilities with different buffer distances and countries guidelines. 

I want to thanks again for your suggestions and i hope that the current draft will meet your expectation. 

 

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 3

Reviewer 1 Report (New Reviewer)

Please see the attached. 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear Sir Thank you very much for your constructive suggestions to improve the paper. We did our best to amend the paper as suggested. Please find the details in the sheet attached. 

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Although this is an interesting topic, as you know there is a large literature on urban park accessibility issues, which has already made similar or further arguments than those the author proposes. The authors thus need to dig deeper into their contributions, strengthen their methodology and improve their empirical data.

The authors have created buffers from the shapes of parks. Does that mean people get access to a specific park by reaching any point of its physical boundary? Does that fit the reality?

The authors' major indicator of park accessibility is the service area ratio. Is the numerator "total area of the city" or "total built-up areas"? How do you evaluate the accessibility of parks from where residents actually live? Can the park facilities meet the specific needs/preferences of residents within its buffer?

Does the physical buffers align with people's actual travel distance/ travel time as they get access to the parks?

Table 6 is not enough as a spatially analysis result. At the very least, it would be helpful to see another map of population density and distribution.

Figure 5 and 6 should be made more self-explanatory by including title, place/park names, data sources and dates, and necessary locators or annotations. For Figure 6, it will be even more helpful to see catchment areas for parks and greenspaces of different typology categories.

How the city-wide aggregated survey results support your claims about place-based spatial accessibility? 

The results and recommendations are described very casually. I suggest develop 2-3 scenarios for planning interventions that could help compare effectiveness and address the parks and greenspace mismatch. If this sounds interesting, the authors will need to better understand how parks and greenspace planning in Hyderabad is currently done.

 

Author Response

Dear Sir

Thanks for your constructive comments. We tried our best to address each comment with the possible details we can. I hope the current version will meet your expaction. thanks 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

1. Flow chart must be updated by following the flow chart preparation guidance  (flowchart rules for shapes). 

2. All the maps are required to be prepared following GIS map preparation guidelines.

3. Follow manuscript development standard guidelines while updating this paper.

4. In Table1, why is Park Size calculated in ha and catchment area in meters? Does the catchment area represent distance?

5. 'Theoretical Consideration and Review of Previous Research' should be part of the introduction and need to be crisp while conveying messages. 

6. Authors should include some quantitative measures for describing the conditions of the parks.

 

 

 

 

Author Response

Dear Sir

Thanks for your constructive comments. We tried our best to address each comment with the possible details. I hope the current version will meet your expectation. thanks 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

I thank the authors for their thoughtful revisions.

Some of the literatures added are quite old. How do you think about your research's contribution to the scholarship of accessibility based on this review?

The legends for Figure 3-7 can be improved. It's not clear what each of the white boxes refers to. It will also be helpful to replace GIS layer names with readable legend names. Please also add distance units in Figure 7.

You have used 200m, 300m, and 400m for the buffers, but it seems only the 400m buffers are used for the subsequent calculation - do you need the other two? When it comes to different categories of parks, there are new thresholds (3200m, 1200m, etc.). Could you identify your criteria/rationale for using these different distances?

You have done detailed spatial analysis. In your recommendation section, do you have a few recommended places on the map?

 

Reviewer 2 Report

Some major research questions still remain unanswered with multiple corrections in maps, tables and figures. The authors need to dig deeper into their contributions, strengths, proposed methodology and improve their manuscript. Some editing for English language is required throughout the manuscript due to too many mistakes.