The characteristics of leisure activities and the built environment influences in large-scale social housing communities in China: the case study of Shanghai and Nanjing

Abstract

In large-scale residential communities for social housing in China where low-income groups gather, public green space is the most dominant public leisure space for residents. Therefore, researches on the characteristics of leisure activities in these communities and the built environment factors that exert an impact on leisure activities would provide an important theoretical basis for future reform of the public space of large-scale social housing communities in China. The study uses the method of behavioral mapping to obtain the data of the residents’ leisure activities in two typical large-scale social housing communities in Nanjing and Shanghai. This study employs methods such as syntactic modeling and site investigation to collect data of environmental factors. This study processes them with the multi-factor linear regression model to explore the “environment-behavior” relationship. The results indicate that the leisure activities of middle and low-income groups in large-scale communities follow a certain pattern in terms of the changes in time axis, sex ratio, location, willingness to socialize. Integrating the impacts of spatial structure and site elements with three groups of variables–spatial configuration, planning conditions and site elements–can explain approximately 70% of the leisure activities distribution.