Spatial Distribution and Land Development Parameters of Shopping Centers Based on GIS Analysis: A Case Study on Kraków, Poland
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Authors have made a great effort to collect the data, analyze it and write this paper. However, paper needs more focus. Objectives of the study should be clearly mentioned and explain why this study is important and what are the broader implications. Some of these are discussed at the end, but it can come in the beginning to make the case for the broader impacts of this study.
See the list below for some specific comments:
L 10: Not clear what “objects” you are referring to
Change the word “Object” with shopping center throughout the paper when referring it to a shopping center
L37: Clearly say that this is relatively new in Poland. Beginning
Provide data source for figure 1.
90-105: Are there any particular thresholds in Poland with respect to these indicators mentioned here? How does your results compare to those? (discuss the comparison in the results/ discussion section.
196: Change In-dex to Index
Table 1: fix the quotes – remove them! – there are weird double quotes in the beginning of the Shopping center names throughout the paper. This needs to be fixed.
251- 261: remove quotes on Shopping center names
Tabl2: Spelling – Length
Table 6: Plaza Krakow GPR numbers are misleading because most of it is water. This is an out layer. It should be excluded from the analysis – then your values will change significantly.
Table 7: Fix the decimal points.
Table 8 and table 9 need to be discussed more.
Author Response
Dear Sir/Madam
Thank You very much for your comments. We presented the research aims and their impact in the first section of the article (L145-156). According to your suggestion, we added information about the importance of the study and why it might be helpful for spatial policy in Poland (L157-161).
See the list below for some specific comments:
L 10: Not clear what “objects” you are referring to
Change the word “Object” with shopping center throughout the paper when referring it to a shopping center
We used the word “object” to avoid repeating the locution “shopping center”. According to your suggestion, we changed most examples with “shopping center” or “facilities”.
L37: Clearly say that this is relatively new in Poland. Beginning
We added this information.
Provide data source for figure 1.
We added data source.
90-105: Are there any particular thresholds in Poland with respect to these indicators mentioned here? How does your results compare to those? (discuss the comparison in the results/ discussion section.
Currently, in Poland, there are no generally applicable standards regarding the size of land development indicators of shopping centers. We developed this information in section 6 and compared it to the most common values found in Krakow's planning documents (L1266-1273).
196: Change In-dex to Index
We corrected that.
Table 1: fix the quotes – remove them! – there are weird double quotes in the beginning of the Shopping center names throughout the paper. This needs to be fixed.
251- 261: remove quotes on Shopping center names
We corrected all of them in the article.
Tabl2: Spelling – Length
We corrected that.
Table 6: Plaza Krakow GPR numbers are misleading because most of it is water. This is an out layer. It should be excluded from the analysis – then your values will change significantly.
We noticed that this example is an exception. In the case of BPR and FAR indicators, the exclusion of Kraków Plaza does not significantly change them. Only in the case of the GPR there is a difference in the mean value and also in the course of the trend line. For this reason, based on your suggestions, we took this difference into account by correcting the data in the tables and graphs. This exception did not alter the overall results and conclusions.
Thank you very much – it was a helpful suggestion.
Table 7: Fix the decimal points.
We corrected that.
Table 8 and table 9 need to be discussed more.
We have added a broader comment.
We have also checked the English spelling and grammar, in case of your doubts, please indicate specific places for correction.
Best regards
authors
Reviewer 2 Report
Research on the spatial distribution of urban commercial centers is of great
significance for guiding commercial layout and urban planning. This article deals
with the trend in the way of locating and developing shopping center areas, showing
the changes taking place over the years.
Although this article has many advantages and unfinished work by the predecessors,
there are also many problems in the writing process of the article. The main points
are as follows:
1-References in the text should be marked in the same way as the journal.
2-L159:"own,- proprietary - field studies were 159 used." The presentation is unclear and does not facilitate the reader's understanding of the methodology and data sources.
3-L196:Nearest Neighbor In-dex, maybe Index
4-Figure 13.The formula in the figure is too small.
Author Response
Dear Sir/Madam
Thank You very much for your comments. We corrected our article according to your suggestions.
Although this article has many advantages and unfinished work by the predecessors,
there are also many problems in the writing process of the article. The main points
are as follows:
1-References in the text should be marked in the same way as the journal.
We have prepared the article in accordance with the journal's guidelines included in the template. It will still be subject to editorial work. Together with the editor, we will make the required changes.
2-L159:"own,- proprietary - field studies were 159 used." The presentation is unclear and does not facilitate the reader's understanding of the methodology and data sources.
By the phrase "own,- proprietary - field studies” we meant our own urban inventory and, on its basis, the validity of databases. We have changed this term to „own urban inventory” (L174).
3-L196:Nearest Neighbor In-dex, maybe Index
We corrected it.
4-Figure 13.The formula in the figure is too small.
We changed all graphs to make them more readable.
We have also checked the English spelling and grammar, in case of your doubts, please indicate specific places for correction.
Best regards
authors
Reviewer 3 Report
In this study. the authors adopted spatial techniques to analyze the spatial distribution and land development parameters of shopping centers in Krakow. However, this study is too superficial to be concerned as a formal publication. My main comments are as follows:
1) There are only 13 shopping centers in Krakow, of which the number is too small to be explored with spatial techniques like standard deviation ellipse (SDE) and nearest neighbor index (NNI). In particular, it is meaningless to analyze them of different groups, i.e. development fields and construction time.
Accessibility analysis to them could be more interesting and deserved further attempts.
2) In section 4.1 the land development indicators were presented and correlatively analyzed with year of construction and distance to city center. As indicated in the manuscript, the results didn't show significant correlations among them. Moreover, it is improper to regress the indicators against the year of construction.
3) What do you mean and how to calculate the following terms:
investment area, expected mean distance, ...
Author Response
Dear Sir/Madam
Thank You very much for your comments. We have taken with concern into the superficiality of our research. Our study is part of a broader analysis we've been conducting over the past four years about shopping centers and their impact on transforming the urban fabric. Based on the remaining reviews, we believe that our research will meet with interest and will be able to be published.
In this study. the authors adopted spatial techniques to analyze the spatial distribution and land development parameters of shopping centers in Krakow. However, this study is too superficial to be concerned as a formal publication. My main comments are as follows:
1) There are only 13 shopping centers in Krakow, of which the number is too small to be explored with spatial techniques like standard deviation ellipse (SDE) and nearest neighbor index (NNI). In particular, it is meaningless to analyze them of different groups, i.e. development fields and construction time.
In Poland, the largest number of shopping centers is located in Warsaw – the capital of the country. Krakow is the fifth city in Poland in terms of the number of shopping centers. Of course, the number of 15 Cracow shopping centers may seem hardly conclusive, but this is a study in the whole group, which is why it concerns the whole issue. In the global context, the size of this collection depends on the scale of the city. Other values will be obtained in the case of huge global metropolises, and others in large cities of Central and Eastern Europe. Similar studies using the standard deviation ellipse (SDE) and nearest neighbour index (NNI) have been done and published by other scientists, e.g. for Prague and Bratislava (in the article the authors referred to these studies). The authors agree that the number of cases studied is not impressive, but that doesn't mean they can't be investigated — they constitute the whole issue.
Accessibility analysis to them could be more interesting and deserved further attempts.
The accessibility analysis was part of the research presented in the doctoral dissertation of one of the authors. However, this research focused on the spatial distribution of shopping centers and changes in the way their areas are developed. This is a valuable suggestion that the authors will try to take into account in future works.
2) In section 4.1 the land development indicators were presented and correlatively analyzed with year of construction and distance to city center. As indicated in the manuscript, the results didn't show significant correlations among them. Moreover, it is improper to regress the indicators against the year of construction.
Spatial changes in cities constitute a process spread over time. They have often gradual nature – they are threshold changes – sometimes related to historical events / economic changes, etc. For this reason, the construction period is important for identifying urban changes, including changes in the way land is developed, measured by urban indicators. In turn, the distance from the city center allows to take into account the different type of development. Type of development - its compactness / intensity – can be different in central, historical areas, and different in peripheral areas. Previous research shows that to analyse spatial changes, it is necessary to take into account the date of construction of the investment or its distance from the city center. To what extent (in a given case) they will have an impact and whether there is a trend, research shows.
3) What do you mean and how to calculate the following terms:
investment area, expected mean distance, ...
As suggested, the authors supplemented definitions of these concepts and the appropriate formulas needed to calculate them (L223-226 and L246-247).
We have also checked the English spelling and grammar, in case of your doubts, please indicate specific places for correction.
Best regards
authors
Round 2
Reviewer 3 Report
I don't think this manuscript has been revised well. My concerns were replied in the response file, but I am not convinced，e.g. the choice of SDE to analyze the spatial distribution of shopping centers. To know the development of shopping centers in Krakow is not attractive for most of readers. So it is not acceptable if the technical framework could be misleading.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer
Thank you very much for your feedback. Krakow is one of the oldest cities and at the same time the second-largest city in Poland in terms of population. Once it was the capital of Polish (in the years 1320 – 1609), which in the seventeenth century was moved to Warsaw. It has a historical urban layout and a rich cultural layer. The Old Town of Krakow is listed in the UNESCO world cultural heritage. For this reason, the analysis of the development of modern shopping centers – large-scale facilities, which are a clearly different form of development, is important from the point of view of sustainable urban development and preservation of spatial order, especially in historical tissue. The first shopping centers were built in the USA, where they were initially implemented in suburban areas. American cities are much younger, and the specificity of their building structure is different from European medieval cities, i.a. such as Krakow. The implementation of shopping centers in cities with medieval roots, with historic buildings, is a difficult issue that is worth special assessment to limit the negative impact of such large objects i.a. on the broadly understood spatial order (for example structure and layout of buildings, functioning of the transport system, continuity of natural systems and pedestrian connections).
The number of shopping centers in Krakow does not differ significantly from the number of such facilities in other large polish cities or in neighboring capitals of Central and Eastern Europe (we added information on this subject in the first chapter – lines 70-83). From the point of view of statistics, when determining the minimum sample size, the more observations we have, the more accurate our estimation is. However, 15 shopping centers in Krakow are a complete collection, not just a representative sample, which meets one of the conditions for conducting point data analysis. A minimum of 3 points (non-colinear) are needed to determine the ellipse. In order to objective assess the distribution of objects, it is necessary to use the method of spatial analysis, which is in particular SDE.
The reviewer's comments are very valuable to us. We will also look for other methods in further research. For this reason, we please kindly suggest what other, objective methods of spatial analysis, can be used for smaller data sets to evaluate the measure of spatial distribution.
Best regards
