Abstract
Urban parks provide multiple non-material benefits to human health and well-being; measuring these “intangible” benefits mainly co-produced by the spatial interactivity between dwellers and urban parks is vital for urban green space management. This paper introduced “vitality” to measure the intangible benefits of urban parks and constructed a straightforward and spatially explicit approach to assess the park vitality based on visiting intensity and recreational satisfaction rate. Freely available data of check-in comments on parks, points-of-interest (POIs), and other multi-source data from Beijing were used to assess the urban park vitality and explore the factors influencing it from the perspectives of recreational service supply, demand, and spatial linking characteristics. We found that the urban park vitalities decreased along the urban–rural gradient. The presence of water and facility density in the parks have significant positive impacts on park vitality, and high population density nearby was a positive factor. Moreover, the external higher levels of the POI-based urban function mix and density, as well as developed public transportation, were strongly associated with greater park vitality. Our research proposed a feasible and effective method to assess the park vitality, and the findings from this study have significant implications for optimizing the spatial configuration of urban parks.
Highlights
Human health and well-being are linked to the natural environment in a myriad of ways [1].With rapid urbanization and the increasing urban population, the demand for contact with nature and high-quality life for urban residents is increasing
The hypothesis of an equal median vitality across different park locations was rejected (Kruskal–Wallis test, p < 0.001), which showed that the park vitality decreased significantly along the urban–rural gradient
The Bonferroni test revealed that the park vitality within the 2nd ring was significantly higher than those in the 4th-5th ring and 5th-6th ring area (p < 0.001)
Summary
Human health and well-being are linked to the natural environment in a myriad of ways [1].With rapid urbanization and the increasing urban population, the demand for contact with nature and high-quality life for urban residents is increasing. Urban green space provides a number of cultural ecosystem services that include spiritual enrichment, cognitive development, reflection, sense of place, and recreational experiences [2], which play an important role in improving the physical and psychological health of residents, maintaining good social relations, and improving overall quality of life [1,3,4,5]. These non-material benefits provided by urban green spaces have intrigued many researchers; due to their “intangibility” and “subjectivity” [6,7], they are commonly assessed. Public Health 2020, 17, 1615; doi:10.3390/ijerph17051615 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph
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