Abstract With the development of market economy and urbanization, the daily living behavior and living space of urban residents tend to extend to communities which will become the carrier of people's daily activities and perform more and more social space functions. The commercial areas in urban communities will present the characteristics of the quality of living space and its types, structures and distribution patterns will reveal the life quality of urban residents. Study on living space planning for urban communities, which is a new research field in western countries, is cross-disciplinary studies crossing the boundaries of the urban geography, the urban social geography and the city planning. This paper aims to explore the characteristics of residential and living spaces based on the theories of humanism and sustainable development. With the urbanization and the development of market economy in China, communities in urban areas are increasingly forming. So the living space planning grounded on the residents' lifestyles and daily activities should be carried out successfully. The study on the micro-location of the commercial recreation places is one of the frontier research areas in the field of the urban geography and social geography. It is also the frontier research topic in the field of urban (social) location and commercial recreation location; furthermore, it is one of the basic theories of city and community planning as well as commercial recreation programming and management. The authors review the literatures on the distribution of commercial areas in urban communities and western new urbanism based planning philosophy of commercial areas. Through the humanistic methodology, they point out four distributional modes of commercial areas in urban communities which include (1) the mode based on the theory of urban business and entertainment centered distribution; (2) the mode based on the spatial activities of business and entertainment; (3) the mode based on the accessibility to community resources; (4) the mode based on the theory of social classification. The research result is of significance in establishing a systematic theory of micro-location of commercial areas in megalopolis and the theoretical system is demonstrated in the field of urban geography and social geography. Therefore, it provides a valuable theory for the humanistic urban living community planning.
2010, Vol. 25 
