Characteristics and Correlates of Leisure Walking Based on the Comprehensive Benefits of Space-Time Opportunity and Health Promotion

Abstract

At present, the continuous improvement of urban residents' quality of life puts forward higher requirements for exploring the supply and demand of leisure walking. Against this background, this study focuses on leisure walking, taking the 15-minute community life circle as the space-time scope to re-examine the cumulative health effect of leisure walking as physical activity. Additionally, this study constructs a research framework to highlight the comprehensive benefits of leisure walking, including space-time opportunity and health promotion. Based on the research framework, this study uses comprehensive survey data from relevant communities in Nanjing to conduct an empirical study on the characteristics and influencing factors of leisure walking. The results show that the leisure walking of most residents makes it difficult to obtain comprehensive benefits, including space-time opportunity and health promotion. The built environment of the 15-minute community life circle significantly affects leisure walking based on the comprehensive benefits of space-time opportunity and health promotion. Specifically, the dense distribution of walkable paths has a promoting effect on overall residents and residents based on age and income stratification. In contrast, high-density population distribution and living locations far from the city center have an inhibitory effect. In addition, dense parks, high green coverage, and good public space accessibility positively affect stratified residents. The influence of individual attributes involves three aspects: socioeconomic attributes, health status, and family socioeconomic attributes. Specifically, overall or stratified residents with flexible and abundant leisure time and family members' accompanying behavior are more likely to participate in leisure walking and obtain more health benefits in a shorter space-time range. However, affected by the limited leisure time and poor physical condition, overall or stratified residents with a higher level of personal monthly income, families with children (<18 years old) who need to be cared for, and sub-health symptoms have fewer opportunities to walk leisurely within the 15-minute community life circle and obtain fewer health benefits. Therefore, space optimization that considers the comprehensive benefits of space-time opportunity and health promotion should cover all residents to the greatest extent possible and strengthen the overall planning, connection, and enrichment of leisure walking resource allocation inside and outside the life circle. The differences between this study and previous ones include two aspects. Taking high-density and highly mobile cities in China as case studies, first, at the community level, this study combines the perspectives of space-time behavior and health, comprehensively measures the space-time opportunity and health promotion effects of leisure walking, and integrates the comprehensive value of leisure walking into urban social spaces. Second, when examining the comprehensive impact of the community built environment on leisure walking space-time opportunity and health promotion, it combines objective and subjective perceptions to more realistically evaluate the residents' activity environment.

Keywords

• leisure walking
• space-time opportunity
• health
• 15-minute community life circle
• nanjing