The Progressive Effects of Built Environments on Supporting Physical Activity Diversity in High-Density Areas: A Case Study in Shenzhen, China
Abstract Background: Physical activity diversity (PAD) is an essential indicator to present the vitality of health city, and how to improve PAD from the built environment perspective is a key issue for healthy urban planning and design, especially in high-density cities; Methods: This study selected Shenzhen, China as a representative case, combined the diversity of PA participants, types and occurrence times for the comprehensive understanding of PAD, fully used multiple source data for the measurement and statistical analysis of PAD and built environments, to discover the relationships between the built environment and PAD, and to explore the different effects in clustered and sprawled high-density urban forms; Results: PAD was unevenly distributed in Shenzhen, higher in the clustered areas and lower in the sprawled ares and the effects of the built environment on PAD were significantly different between two kinds of areas; Conclusions: the built environment supports PAD by progressive effects, in which accessibility is the necessary and funda-mental condition to activate individual PAs, inclusiveness is sufficiently supports the coaction of various kind of PAs to consolidate PAD, and landscape attractiveness furtherly aggregates more PAs to achieve higher PAD. To create accessible, inclusive, and attractive built environments are crucial ways to improve the vitality of healthy city development in high-density cities.