The Relationship Between Environment Characteristics and Old Citizen’s Physical Activates in Residential Area, Harbin, China

Abstract

Walking is one of the main travel mode for old citizen (over 60 years old) in their daily life, so understanding how the environment characteristics of residential area could effect the old citizen’s physical activities could help the designer to work better on old citizen friendly urban plan. This study attempts to comprehensively and objectively research on the relationship between environment characteristics and old citizen’s physical activities in Harbin residential areas. Spatial feature and traffic management have been thought as the main determinate of walkability of urban space, however physical features and urban design details have been rarely mentioned. Old citizen’s perception has been examined in this study: 15 environment characteristics problems have been identified in the studied residential areas based on the understanding of pervious researches. Through observations and questionnaire surveys, the environment characteristics of each case study were evaluated and the physical problems were discovered. Additionally, old citizen’s perception on the identified problems and their effects on their physical activities of the studied areas were found and defined, in both high and low walkability residential area.