Creating a Healthy Environment for Elderly People in Urban Public Activity Space

According to statistics, the global, population aging problem is severe and growing rapidly. The aging problem is most obvious in some European countries, and most of them are developed countries, such as Japan, Italy, Germany, France, etc. The current internal and external environments of parks in China are complex. The inefficient utilization of space in urban parks is a prominent problem. The design of public spaces that only considers the visual experience is incomplete. Based on the optimization of urban park space planning principle, this study examined a new measure of the acoustic environment in elderly public activity space and designed a new elderly healthy urban park environment.

Methods: Using the main parks in Shenyang (Zhongshan Park, Nanhu Park, Youth Park, and Labor park) as the study sites, this study analyzed problems in the acoustic environmental data through on-site inspection, questionnaire survey, and physical data collection. By using general linear regression and multiple regression methods, this study analyzed the impacts of plant density, site elevation, structure enclosure, functional mixing degree on the acoustic environment, and elderly population activities. Based on the acoustic environment, we propose improvements and construction ideas, as well as technical methods, for urban elderly public activity space planning. The utility of the "elderly public activity space planning principle" was also considered.

Results: Elderly activity space in urban parks was affected by three main factors-plant density, degree of structural enclosure, and function mixing degree. These factors should be optimized to construct healthy acoustic environments and attract different types of people.

Discussion: Compared to past studies, the new influencing factors of the planning principle for elderly public activity space found in this study, would benefit the urban park environment for the elderly and support sustainable development of cities.

Conclusions: This study proposes three optimizations to the elderly urban park space planning principle and builds four healthy models of elderly urban space activity.