Seeing prosperity, confronting crime: Infrastructure inequality and perceived wealth in Chinese cities

Cities increasingly rely on infrastructure investment and streetscape upgrading to improve urban conditions, yet how macro-scale infrastructure inequality and micro-scale street environments relate to different dimensions of urban experience remains insufficiently understood. This study develops a geospatial learning framework to examine their associations with two distinct outcomes across Chinese cities: recorded crime rates and perceived wealth. The framework combines network-based accessibility measures for infrastructure systems, within-city inequality indicators, street-view-derived environmental and perceptual measures, and interpretable machine-learning analysis. The results reveal divergent spatial patterns. Recorded crime rates are most strongly associated with inequalities in telecommunications and educational infrastructure accessibility, together with selected streetscape characteristics. Telecommunications accessibility inequality shows a strong positive association with recorded crime rates, with its contribution becoming more pronounced at higher levels of inequality. By contrast, perceived wealth is explained predominantly by directly visible streetscape characteristics, particularly greenness, complexity, and openness, while infrastructure, socioeconomic, and security-governance variables contribute less. These findings show that recorded crime and perceived wealth capture different dimensions of the urban environment: the former is more closely associated with infrastructure accessibility inequality and selected street conditions, whereas the latter is primarily structured by visual streetscape cues. This distinction highlights the need to consider both spatial inequality and street-level environmental quality in evaluating urban conditions. For urban policy, strategies focused on beautification alone may overlook underlying vulnerabilities, while more equitable infrastructure provision may better address persistent spatial disparities in recorded crime rates.