Campus environmental quality and streetscape features related to walking activity

Abstract

Many college students have adopted sedentary and physically inactive lifestyles, leading to obesity, diabetes, and other epidemics. Improving campus walkability can promote students’ walking activities and health conditions. This study aims to explore the influence of street-level environmental walkability attributes on campus pedestrian activity in a developing country, and thus present physical activity and health promotion campus planning and design strategies. Based on the Urban Design Quality theory, we use field audit to measure five environmental qualities and 23 types of streetscape features at eight Chinese university campuses. Several negative binomial regression models, without spatial autocorrelation, are fitted to analyze the effect of campus micro-scale walkability environmental attributes on pedestrian volume in different types of campuses. We found that environmental qualities and street space part streetscape features significantly affect pedestrian volume. Pedestrian-oriented campus planning strategies are presented based on the results.

Keywords

• environmental quality
• streetscape features
• walkability
• pedestrian volume
• campus planning