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The Impact of Urban Design on Physical Activity and Social Interaction

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A special issue of International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (ISSN 1660-4601). This special issue belongs to the section "Environmental Science and Engineering".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (21 April 2023) | Viewed by 9255

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Special Issue Editors

Dr. Terry Van Dijk

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Guest Editor

Faculty of Spatial Sciences, Groningen University, 9747 AD Groningen, The Netherlands
Interests: spatial quality; urban design; spatial planning; healthy cities; decision-making processes; design thinking

Dr. Chen Chen

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Co-Guest Editor

School of International Affairs and Public Administration, Ocean University of China, Qingdao 266100, China
Interests: social impact assessment; university social responsibility; community engagement; social license to operate; urban regeneration

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

With an ever-increasing share of the urban population living in cities, the health of more and more individuals and communities depends on whether the built environment they live their lives in promotes physical activity and social interaction. The placement of buildings, the ease of entering and leaving them, the mix of land uses, road designs facilitating or hampering walking and cycling, the quality of public spaces and parks, and the proneness to crime of building design are just some of the prerequisite considerations for what lifestyles are most likely to emerge in a city.

This Special Issue seeks to collect evidence on what urban design principles help to create healthy cities, here understood as places where the built environment accommodates healthy lifestyles and suppresses less-healthy ones. Authors are invited to provide empirical studies tying the built environment to human behavior, especially physical activity levels and social interactions in public spaces. Together these papers will serve as an evidence base inspiring designers of the built environment of the future.

Dr. Terry Van Dijk
Dr. Chen Chen
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2500 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

urban design
lifestyle choices
physical activity
environmental psychology
public spaces
green spaces
spatial quality

Published Papers (4 papers)

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Research

27 pages, 16486 KiB

Open AccessArticle

What Do Local People Really Need from a Place? Defining Local Place Qualities with Assessment of Users’ Perceptions

by Huiming Liu, Bin Li, Qing Liu, Yifan Li, Jing Zhao, Xuechun Wang, Chaoyi Cui and Shaoting Zeng

Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2023, 20(2), 1269; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph20021269 - 10 Jan 2023

Viewed by 1866

Abstract

China is facing a serious urban regeneration issue in which replicable international-style locations are losing their socio-cultural adaptability, especially in anonymous residential neighbourhoods. This study defines the key location qualities from local literature and then refines these qualities through observation investigations and statistical analysis (n = 180) to establish links between theories and contemporary uses. Based on the results, a correlation analysis of local place qualities was assessed from users’ perceptions (n = 180) to identify the interactional influences between each indicator of local place qualities. Finally, local place qualities were scored to address their level of impact on users’ perceptions. The results highlighted health, enjoyment, and social dependence as the most concerning factors in site investigations based on local cognitions. They are strongly associated with key local place qualities (naturality, functionality, cosmological cognitions, and interdependent sociability), directly and indirectly resulting in different levels of impact on users’ perceptions at different scales. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Impact of Urban Design on Physical Activity and Social Interaction)

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17 pages, 2480 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Impact of Subjective and Objective Factors on Subway Travel Behavior: Spatial Differentiation

by Qi Chen, Yibo Yan, Xu Zhang and Jian Chen

Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2022, 19(23), 15858; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph192315858 - 28 Nov 2022

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1745

Abstract

People’s perceptions and understanding of the built environment can shape and regulate travel intention and behavior. From the perspective of urban design, improving the built urban environment is an important way to encourage green travel. This study determined the impact path from the built environment to subway travel behavior, considering the intermediate effect of psychological factors. The impact path could provide feedback for optimizing the built environment, thereby improving the ratio of subway travel. In this study, the impact path hypothesis of “objective environment—subjective psychological—travel behavior” was first proposed, taking travelers’ psychological perceptions as the intermediary variable. Second, questionnaires and geographic information were used to measure the objective environment and subjective psychological perceptions. Third, a structural equation model was constructed to verify the proposed path hypothesis. Finally, multiscale geographically weighted regression was used to analyze the influence of subjective and objective factors on travel behavior and its spatial differences. The empirical case sampled 405 residents of Zhengzhou, China. The results verified the proposed impact path hypothesis and revealed spatial heterogeneity in its impact on travel behavior. The research explains how travel behavior is generated and could support the optimization of the urban built environment. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Impact of Urban Design on Physical Activity and Social Interaction)

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17 pages, 5160 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Perception of Spatial Legibility and Its Association with Human Mobility Patterns: An Empirical Assessment of the Historical Districts in Rasht, Iran

by Reza Askarizad and Jinliao He

Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2022, 19(22), 15258; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph192215258 - 18 Nov 2022

Cited by 7 | Viewed by 2635

Abstract

Achieving legibility within the context of historical districts has become a controversial problem due to their widespread growth and unconventional constructions within, which has led to inconsistencies in the urban context system, and a decrease in the level of urban sociability. This paper aims to provide an empirical assessment towards facilitating the perception of spatial legibility and its association with human mobility patterns. To this end, a novel mix method was developed in order to comprehend the association between spatial legibility and human mobility patterns using Space Syntax, cognitive sketch maps, and time-lapse photography. The results revealed that there is a significant association between spatial legibility and human mobility patterns, such that the incorporation of objective and subjective factors affecting legibility, including highly integrated morphological characteristics along with the saliency of landmarks featuring historical values, can lead to increased human mobility patterns in terms of use frequency. Accordingly, this research aids urban planners and designers in recognizing how to deal with historical districts in order to foster the sociability of these areas and create a lively and socially sustainable urban environment. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Impact of Urban Design on Physical Activity and Social Interaction)

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32 pages, 10646 KiB

Open AccessArticle

On Serendipitous Campus Meetings: A User Survey

by Sascha Naomi Jansz, Mark Mobach, Terry van Dijk, Esther de Vries and Roeland van Hout

Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2022, 19(21), 14504; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph192114504 - 4 Nov 2022

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 2043

Abstract

With campuses opening up and stimulating interactions among different campus users more and more, we aim to identify the characteristics of successful meeting places (locations) on campus. These can help practitioners such as campus managers and directors to further optimize their campus to facilitate unplanned or serendipitous meetings between academic staff and companies. A survey on three Dutch campuses, including questions on both services and locations, was analyzed both spatially and statistically using principal component (PC) and regression analysis. Four PCs were found for services (Relax, Network, Proximity and Availability) and three PCs were found for locations (Aesthetics, Cleaned and Indoor Environment). Personal characteristics as explanatory variables were not significant or only had very small effect sizes, indicating that a campus’ design does not need to be tailored to certain user groups but can be effective for all. The pattern of successful locations is discussed, including the variables in each PC. These PCs provide a framework for practitioners who want to improve their campus’ design to further facilitate unplanned meetings, thus contributing to cooperation between campus users, hopefully leading to further innovation. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Impact of Urban Design on Physical Activity and Social Interaction)

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