Abstract
The urban heat islands considerably make thermal complaints, energy consumption and public health risks in dense urban cores with limited green areas. While landscape optimization is a recognized damage reduction strategy, practical and quantifiable approaches for highly urbanized areas remain scarce. In this study, the city is reconverted as a continuous mosaic of intertwined gray (built) and Greens (vegetated) rooms. We apply a frame “Down Scale-Classify-Attribute” to analyze urban functional zones on a gray-to-green continuum. We concentrated on Beijing's fifth ring road area and analyzed 11 landscape metrics in socio -economic function zones with perverse surface fraction (PSF) (0–1 at intervals of 0.05). The results identified PSF = 0.5 as a critical threshold, which distinguishes two thermal regulatory regimes. Under this value, building patterns (e.g. coverage ratio, height, sky view factor) dominate the temperature regulation. In these low-PSF zones (
Data availability
Data is provided on request.
© 2025 published by Elsevier Ltd.