The spatial configuration of local climate zones reveals effects on wayfinding in human walking

90%, 95%, and 99% confidence intervals corresponding to 0.1, 0.05, and 0.01 levels of signifi- cance. Getis-Ord Gi* results with a 99% confidence interval indicate extreme clusters of hot or cold values. Hot spots are the regions where the landscape metrics with distinctly high values aggregate locally compared with surroundings, while cold spots show extremely low values of landscape metrics in statistics. Those hot or cold spots were identified as the priorities for spa- tial reconfigurations after determining spatial planning strategies based on correlation analysis. 3. Results 3.1 Quantifications and comparisons of wayfinding among cities As a proxy for wayfinding, the intelligibility value, that is, the coefficient of determination (R2 values) between local connectivity and city integration, has been quantified (Fig 4) to illustrate the heterogeneous wayfinding in each city (Fig 5). The whole region showed pretty low intelli- gibility values. Cities in the more central region, such as Shenzhen and Dongguan, had particu- larly lower intelligibility values than outer cities. In other words, throughout the GBA, people were hard to find their way based on the local observations of surrounding environments. This situation was worse in the regional center, because of the more asynchronous development between local connectivity and city accessibility (Fig 4). Whereas, Huizhou and Zhaoqing, as two peripheral cities in the GBA, had the highest intelligibility values, in which people find it

easier to identify the spatial configurations of the whole city from the local places than people in other cities. This heterogeneity in intelligibility-based wayfinding is thought to be related to the diverse urban spatial configurations. Fig 3. The local climate zone (LCZ) classification in the GBA in 2019. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0289780.g003 PLOS ONE The spatial configuration for wayfinding PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0289780 September 8, 2023 7 / 18