The Improving of Sky Gardens’ Environmental Quality from a Health Promotion Perspective

Abstract

The quality of landscape space directly influences public health behaviors, making public assessments of the qualities of the sky garden landscape crucial for optimizing it. This article focuses on three types of typical high-rise building sky garden (plaza-park, rest-stay, and move-pass type) and establishes an evaluation framework for their health promotion characteristics (24 indicators in 7 dimensions) based on existing restorative environment research. Then, questionnaires (354 valid responses) and quantitative calculations were employed to assess the public’s perception of demand in health behaviors and the spatial supply of different sky garden types. Ultimately, the data were processed to propose targeted interventions and recommendations to enhance health benefits using the comprehensive importance-performance analysis method. The results show the following: (1) The public seems to have widely accepted sky gardens in the context of high-density urban environments (near 6.92, below the mean of 7.09). They place greater emphasis on spatial indicators that cater to relaxation activities and show heightened sensitivity toward public facilities (7.32–8.00) that contribute to physical and mental health-related activities. (2) The health promotion performance of different types of sky garden shows significant variation, with the rest-stay sky gardens at the embodied scale demonstrating the greatest competitive advantage. (3) The development of sky gardens has significant potential, and different types of sky garden need to specifically lever-age their characteristics as complementary public spaces.

Keywords

• sky gardens
• health promotion
• importance-performance analysis
• high-density environment
• sustainable healthy living environment