In the context of rapid urbanization, public open spaces in dense urban areas are critical built environment elements to support active lifestyles. Several reviews have explored the associations of ...public open space attributes with physically active and sedentary behavior. However, few reviews have included studies from Asia, and no studies have focused on dense urban areas. This systematic review analyzed 18 observational studies investigating associations between public open space attributes with physical activity and sedentary behavior in dense urban areas of East Asian countries, including Japan, Taiwan, China, and Hong Kong. We found that closer distance to and a greater number of public open spaces and features within them were positively associated with leisure-time physical activity. Places near water features and corridors within public open spaces were associated with more sedentary behavior. These findings inform landscape and urban design guidelines for (re)designing public open spaces to support active lifestyles in high dense urban areas.
•Less public open spaces in dense urban areas can impact inhabitants' behaviors.•Positive associations of POS attributes and leisure-time physical activity.•Sedentary behaviors associated with water features and rest areas within POS.
This study analysed the association between park access and physical activity in an urban context by extracting tweets from the social media platform Twitter. The results show that areas within a ...0.5-mile distance to a park correlate with more physical activity than areas farther than that. Park type might be an essential mediator for the correlation between park size and physical activity. This study suggests that geolocated Twitter data are a viable source of information for researchers inquiring about factors related to urban open space that can contribute to public health.
Semi-open spaces are a key element in the climate adaptive design of rural folk houses and are important places where rural residents perform daily activities in hot-humid areas. In this study, a ...year-long thermal comfort field survey was conducted in rural folk houses in 11 rural areas in the Guangdong Province, the hot-humid area of southern China. The subjective responses of residents were recorded via questionnaires, and all ambient environment parameters were measured. The results show that air speed was greater and relative humidity was lower in the semi-open spaces. The clothing insulation of the survey respondents varied with indoor operative temperatures from 0.27 clo to 1.2 clo during the non-summer season and remained steady at 0.30 clo during the summer season. The thermal neutral, acceptable and preferred indoor operative temperatures were determined for the interior and semi-open spaces in the summer and non-summer. Compared to those of the interior spaces, the thermal neutral temperature was 0.6–1.3 °C lower and the upper limit of 80% acceptable temperature was decreased by 0.8–4.7 °C in the semi-open spaces. The acceptable temperature in the summer for the rural residents was found to be 0.2–1 °C higher than that of the urban residents in the same climate. Psychological factors such as local culture, expectations and perceived control might be the reasons for these differences. This study contributes to a better understanding of the thermal comfort of rural people and to the improvement of rural living conditions.
•Thermal sensitivity of people kept the same regardless of spaces and seasons.•Thermal neutral temperature was lower in semi-open spaces than interior spaces.•Acceptable temperature range was narrower in semi-open spaces than interior spaces.•Acceptable temperature range of rural residents was wider than urban residents.
Urban renewal districts have a relatively high concentration of elderly people. Open spaces are important for the elderly for enhancing social interaction and active aging. However, planning and ...design of open spaces tend to stress on the physical and safety needs of the elderly, while social needs are not frequently addressed. This study intends to identify whether the social needs of the elderly regarding the use of public open spaces in urban renewal districts are addressed in the standard planning and design guidelines which newly planned development and districts are often based upon. Eight focus groups were conducted in elderly community centers in two urban renewal districts in Hong Kong. The results indicate that elderly people consider ‘social and physical activities’, ‘community life facilities and services’ and ‘social network’, as well as a ‘clean and pleasant environment’ to be their most important needs. Thus, planners and designers should take into consideration these criteria for enhancing the social well-being of the elderly and active aging in public open spaces in urban renewal. Furthermore, it stresses that urban renewal districts are part of the elderly's past living experiences and established social networks, which is not the case in new developments and areas. As such, the users' actual needs should be elicited rather than perceived by planners and designers.
•Public open space enhances the social well-being of the elderly and active aging.•Highlights the social concerns of the elderly regarding public open spaces in urban renewal areas•Evaluates to what extent planning considerations in urban renewal differ from newly planned areas
In parallel with the observed greater frequency of natural disasters worldwide, there has been an ever-increasing interest in urban resilience and its assessment. Experience obtained in recent ...extreme events (in particular, earthquakes and floods) has revealed that both the level of preparedness and the response of affected cities were insufficiently high, whereas the recovery process was long and expensive. For this reason improved pre-disaster mitigation actions, as well as smart and strategic urban planning in threatened areas (e.g. in earthquake-prone regions), is essential. For this purpose, a comprehensive review of the existing literature has been performed in relation to the holistic assessment of urban system resilience to natural disasters, with an emphasis on the effect of earthquakes. The main goal of the review was to try to determine how to best assess the resilience of urban systems as a whole, taking into account all of their components, i.e. both the physical components (i.e. of buildings, infrastructure, and open spaces) and the social components (i.e. of the community), as well as the dynamic interactions between them. Besides considering the commonly measured indicators (e.g. determination of the scope of actual structural damage caused by an earthquake), the paper tries to extend the discussion to some indicators which are not so commonly taken into account, by applying a quantitative resilience assessment approach. Based on the results of the described new literature review, a preliminary concept which could be used to assess the seismic resilience of complex urban systems, taking into account all urban components which have been identified as having an important impact on the latter, is presented. This concept consists of three different parts: (i) a probabilistic fragility analysis for each individual physical element (i.e. a building or an infrastructure element), (ii) a composite index methodology for the measurement of community disaster resilience, and (iii) a complex network approach (graph theory) for the assessment of the resilience of urban systems as a whole. Since, in the existing literature, there is a lack of consideration of urban open space, which can have a significant role in the recovery process, it is suggested that, in future research of seismic resilience assessment, such open space should be taken into account, and that an in-depth study of possible recovery strategies be performed.
Long-standing attention has been given to urban vitality and its association with the built environment (BE). However, the multiplicity and complex impacts of BE factors that shape urban vitality ...patterns have not been fully explored. For this purpose, multisource data from 1025 communities in Wuhan, China, were combined to explore the BE vitality nexus. A deep learning method was explored to segment street-view images, on which a composite indicator of urban vitality was developed with social media data. Then, six dimensions of BE factors, neighbourhood attributes, urban form and function, landscape, location, and street configuration, were incorporated into a spatial regression model to systematically examine the composite influences. The results show that population density, community age, open space, the sidewalk ratio, streetlights, shopping and leisure density, integration, and proximity to transportation are positive factors that induce urban vitality, whereas the effects of road density, proximity to parks, and green space have the opposite results. This study contributes to an improved understanding of the BE nexus. Managerial implications for mediating the relationship between planning policies and urban design strategies for the optimization of resource allocation and promotion of sustainable development are discussed.
•Explore the BE-vitality nexus by integrating advanced methods and multi-dimensional BE factors.•Combine a rich variety of big-data to clarify the composite effects of BE factors on urban vitality.•Compose a composite indicator to measure urban vitality by joining street movements and social media data.•Integrate spatial regression and GWR models to reduce the bias caused by spatial autocorrelation and heterogeneity.
Outdoor open space is important to cities and can provide benefits for healthy urban living. Among the many factors that affect space quality and space use, thermal comfort has drawn increasing ...attention from both climatologists and planners. Previous studies mostly focus on hot seasons when the primary concern is to avoid solar exposure and mitigate heat stress. In Shanghai, because of the high indoor humidity, people prefer to go outdoors and enjoy more sunshine in autumn and winter. This paper presents a thermal comfort survey in one urban park in Shanghai from November to January to investigate the role thermal comfort plays in affecting people's evaluation of the outdoor space and activity. Meteorological measurements, questionnaire surveys and unobtrusive observations were carried out. Computer simulations were conducted to evaluate the micro-meteorological conditions. The physiological equivalent temperature (PET) was used to evaluate people's objective thermal comfort level based on micro-meteorological conditions. It is found that visitors' overall comfort was largely affected by their subjective thermal sensation vote (TSV). In winter TSV showed the strongest positive relationship with air temperature and solar radiation, which are also the two most important factors that affect visitors' space use. The study reveals that the neutral PET in Shanghai in winter is around 15–29 °C. It was also found that duration of stay and length of residence in Shanghai affected visitors' thermal adaptation. This study can provide understandings of people's outdoor thermal comfort in autumn and winter in Shanghai and help promote outdoor space use.
•Visitors' thermal comfort in a park in Shanghai was studied for autumn and winter.•Both micro-meteorological monitoring and meteorological simulation were employed.•In winter air temperature and sunshine affect visitors' comfort and space use most.
Purpose The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of public open spaces (POS) on host community in Kano Metropolis. Design/methodology/approach Two sets of questionnaires and participant ...observation were used to collect data for the study. The questionnaires were used to elicit information on the socioeconomic characteristics of residents and users, a total of 140 residents and 70 users were selected for the study using random sampling without replacement. Findings Findings revealed majority of the residents earn above 25,000 naira monthly with a percentage of 32.85% while patrons were dominated by respondents that earn below 25,000 monthly. Also, majority of the respondents (94%) have received formal education. Further findings revealed that POS in Kano Metropolis plays an important role in encouraging recreational activities; although some of the open spaces were to some extent declined, the study confirmed the existence of 28 open spaces from the underlying 35 POS within the metropolis. It is noteworthy to note that males were found to be more (80.9%) among users of all the open spaces in the study area with the least participation from their female counterparts. The study further revealed that the adverse effects faced by users of POS and members of the host communities comprised of lack of facilities within the open space, inadequate security, inadequate lighting, lack of vegetation cover, poor parking spaces, breaching the public peace while the residents perceived the open space as means of obstruction of public facilities, causes accident, causes traffic congestion, environmental pollution, increase in accident, obstruction of public facilities, increased accident, degrades the environment, breaching of public peace, traffic congestion and obstruction of public facilities. Originality/value The outcome of the study will raise the awareness of the people on the importance, conditions of facilities and the impact associated with the usage of open spaces on adjoining residence. It will also inform stakeholders the modalities to prevent further decline or conversation of open space to other land use and promote proper management of open space facilities and mitigate its likely negative impact on the environment. This will contribute toward achieving Sustainable Development Goal 11.
There is growing interest from policy-makers, practitioners, and academics alike in creating indicators of the built environment to measure progress towards achieving a wide range of policy outcomes, ...including enhanced health and wellbeing. Public open space (POS) is a built environment feature that is important for health and wellbeing across the life course, and contributes to the liveability of a region. To optimise health and community wellbeing outcomes, there is a need to test different policy standards and metrics to understand which measures are impactful. Identifying the best POS indicators would be useful tools to measure and monitor progress towards achieving a range of policy and health and wellbeing outcomes. Thus, we propose a method to develop POS indicators from a health and wellbeing lens through: 1) developing a framework conceptualising the pathways in which POS influences health and wellbeing outcomes; and 2) using this conceptual framework as a guide to identify upstream policy-relevant indicators of POS that are evidence-based, specific, quantifiable, and measurable across regions. We also highlight methodological issues and challenges in developing these indicators. In doing so, we have identified eleven potential POS spatial measures to test with population health and wellbeing datasets in Australia. However, these methods may be relevant and applicable to other developed countries, and could be modified for use in developing countries. Together, spatial indicators are analytic tools in the policy environment to benchmark and measure neighbourhoods in terms of POS provision, thereby helping to improve neighbourhood liveability and wellbeing, and people's health.
•Public open space contributes to the liveability of a region, and the health and wellbeing of individuals.•There is interest in creating built environment indicators to achieve policy outcomes, including health and wellbeing.•We have proposed a process to develop evidence-based, quantifiable, and measurable public open space indicators.•A conceptual framework mapping the pathways in which public open space influences health and wellbeing outcomes was developed to guide the selection of policy-relevant public open space measures. The next stages involve testing the measures with health and wellbeing outcomes collected in population health datasets.•Spatial indicators are useful analytic tools in the policy environment to benchmark and measure neighbourhoods in terms of public open space provision, which can help to plan liveable neighbourhoods and improve people's health and wellbeing.
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