Abstract
According to the United Nations, the proportion of the older population is increasing at a faster rate than all other age groups. Hence, the well-being of older adults is a mounting concern worldwide in the current century. Using a single greenery metric, previous studies linked greenness to residents' well-being. This study aims to extend this field by focusing on the mental and physical well-being of older adults by using remote sensing and streetscape metrics in evaluating neighborhood greenness. We selected 20 residential neighborhoods in Guangzhou City, China as the cross-sectional case study areas. We investigated neighborhood normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) collected using remote sensing images, streetscape greenery, and PM2.5 via field surveys. We assessed the health condition of 972 senior residents selected by multi-stage stratified probability proportionate to population size sampling technique (PPS) using a questionnaire survey. We adopted the structural equation model (SEM) in analyzing the pathways that link neighborhood greenness and the mental and physical health of older adults. We found that neighborhood greenness has a positive association with the physical activity by older adults that is positively linked to their physical health. Moreover, neighborhood greenness is positively related to regular social interactions among older adults that is positively linked to their mental health. These findings are consistent with those of previous studies. However, we obtained new results that were unique to China. We found that neighborhood greenness has no significant direct relationship with the physical and mental health of older adults and that social interactions of low-income senior groups are more substantially related to neighborhood greenness than the other groups. Therefore, community planning should emphasize the development of neighborhood greenness, such as parks and street trees, to provide natural spaces for social interactions and places for physical activities among older residents.
Highlights
The 21st century is an era characterized by aging and urbanization, and these characteristics are more prominent in developing countries
No statistical correlation was observed between these variables (r = 0.035, p = 0.4314), which justifies using them as two separate observable indicators in the structural equation model (Figure 3)
The significant positive association pathways which are consistent with hypothesis includes “streetscape greenery—physical exercise—physical health,” “neighborhood normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI)—social interaction—mental health,” and the positive association between mental and physical health is newly found
Summary
The 21st century is an era characterized by aging and urbanization, and these characteristics are more prominent in developing countries. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the proportion of seniors (aged 60 years and older) to the global population will reach 22% in 2050 [1]. Both the aging rate (Proportion of Population ages 65 and above) [2] and urbanization rate (Proportion of Urban Population) [3] in China, are higher than the global average. Numerous studies conducted in developed countries have demonstrated that greenspace exposure is related to wideranging health benefits, including better mental health and physical health [4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15]. Several studies that focused on greenspaces in China explored the relationship between neighborhood environment and residents’ well-being [21,22,23,24,25], which reported positive relationship between neighborhood greenspaces and residents’ well-being, especially in terms of mental health
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