Abstract
With the global trend of population aging, how to integrate the health needs of elderly people into public open space (POS) development while taking into account public interest is a major challenge in the 21st century. Although the issues of elderly people’s health and their POS needs are receiving increasing attention, research on continuous improvement strategies for POS for healthy aging societies is still limited. Hence, this study explored continuous improvement strategies thoroughly and systematically by using the DANP-V model. The findings revealed cognitive differences between expert and elderly groups. Moreover, water features, waste management, and co-maintenance spaces were the three criteria with the largest gap value. POS improvement has previously been implemented based on a priority order ranked from the criterion with largest gap value to the criterion with the smallest one. However, an alternative approach based on the cause–effect relationship is proposed in this paper. The study findings have both theoretical and practical implications for POS planners and designers.
Highlights
Amidst increasing concern about urban populations’ health problems, researchers from a wide range of disciplines have turned their attention to the underlying cause–effect relationships between the urban built environment and public health [1,2,3,4,5]
“land that has been developed for purposes other than building construction” is too general [7]; areas meant for vehicle usage cannot be incorporated into public open space (POS), but it is less clear whether some roads that are not meant for motor vehicles should be defined as POS; whether green spaces within urban areas or those on the edges of urban areas should be included in POS; and whether the ownership of POS should be included in these considerations
To construct the evaluation attributes of POSs, the first subsection involves exploring the new challenges of POSs in the context of the global population aging process; in the second subsection, the applicability and necessity of continuous improvement strategies for POSs are discussed with a view to facilitating sustainable healthy aging; in the third subsection, the approach to constructing environmental attributes is discussed in detail; the forth subsection describes a pretest of these attributes to assess the validity of the indicators
Summary
Amidst increasing concern about urban populations’ health problems, researchers from a wide range of disciplines have turned their attention to the underlying cause–effect relationships between the urban built environment and public health [1,2,3,4,5]. Thereafter, a modified VIKOR method was applied to evaluate a POS in the campus of the Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT) with two different groups (the experts and the elderly) for discovering problems, the systematic and continuous improvement strategies was developed This POS is frequently used by elderly people, is located in the inner city, and is representative of the increasing aging population in China; it was selected as an empirical case. The final section focuses on the crucial findings and discusses future research directions
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