Form Meets Flow: Linking Historic Corridor Morphology to Multi-Scale Accessibility and Pedestrian Interface on Beishan Street, West Lake

Historic linear corridors in living-heritage settings concentrate identity, everyday mobility, and visitor experience. Balancing authenticity, adaptability, and publicness therefore benefits from evidence that jointly characterizes long-term physical change, network accessibility, and eye-level interface conditions. Existing assessments often focus on façades or single time slices, leaving limited evidence that relates decades of built-fabric reconfiguration (changes in building footprints, street edges, and open-space fragmentation) to multi-scale accessibility and pedestrian-facing qualities. We propose an integrated and interpretable workflow for the Beishan Street corridor in the West Lake World Heritage core (Hangzhou) over 1929–2024. Scale-sensitive morphological metrics, multi-radius network measures (integration and centrality), and street-view semantic segmentation are aligned at corridor-segment resolution and examined together with segment-level functional intensity derived from POIs using transparent linear models. The results indicate a long-term shift from a lakeshore-led to a road-led spatial logic, followed by post-2000 stabilization near saturation. Average integration increases, while the high-integration tail becomes thinner. In connector-removal scenarios, the eastern segment shows a relative accessibility decline, and a central hinge node emerges as a vulnerability hotspot (bottleneck) where through-movement concentrates. Eye-level profiles differ by segment: the west exhibits maximal canopy and lower sky visibility, the center shows stronger continuous walls around compounds with intermittent forecourt openings, and the east is characterized by compact residential heritage frontage with low vegetation. Segment-level associations suggest that address and wayfinding density tends to co-occur with clearer frontages, wider sky cones, and stronger tree cover. Transportation-related and access/passage facilities tend to co-occur with higher ground-plane legibility, measured as wider and more continuous road and sidewalk surfaces. Medical and government clusters tend to co-occur with lower sky openness. Recommended actions include the following: (1) mesh-aware protection of key connectors and the hinge, (2) segment-specific targets for façade share and ground cues with planned punctuations, (3) tailored interface standards for institutional clusters, (4) scalable address and wayfinding systems, and (5) event staging that preserves effective roadway and sidewalk capacity.