Urban green spaces provide multiple ecosystem services to improve human health and well-being. Cultural ecosystem services (CES) are recognized as the most important services for urban residents through the key of social interaction. Researchers commonly acknowledge the function of community sports parks to enhance social interaction. Nevertheless, existing studies generally do not pay enough attention to the influence mechanisms of community sports parks and social interaction, especially the different types of spaces in community sports parks, which could be due to the complex feature of social interaction. This paper selects three community sports parks in Chongqing as the case study, uses BBN to identify the influence mechanisms of three common types of spaces (fitness equipment space, path space, and sports court space) in community sports parks and social interaction, aiming to explore how community sports parks enhance social interaction. The results indicated that sports court space such as basketball court and badminton court enhanced social interaction best; however, the spaces farther away from the park entrances were generally less effective in enhancing interaction. All these three types of sports spaces showed the influence mechanism of “Spatial Factors-Activity Type-Social Interaction”, while differences existed in the specific spatial influencing factors. The findings highlight that based on the BBN obtained in this study, the threshold range of spatial factors could be adjusted to enhance the effect of community sports parks on social interaction.

Work and life stresses can cause spiritual fatigue and emotional tension, threatening the physical and psychological health of young people. Several studies have demonstrated the important role and value of pocket parks in the emotional and spiritual refreshment of people. This study quantitatively evaluated the perceived restorative effects associated with the environmental characteristics of a pocket park, and determined the relationships between the physical-environmental characteristics, psychological-environmental characteristics and the restorative effects. In this study, pocket parks in Chongqing City were chosen as the study areas, and a total of 25 sample pictures of the parks were chosen for analysis. Each picture was quantized into 14 physical-environmental indices and three psychological-environmental indices for measurement of the restorative effect. The results showed that the environmental characteristics of parks with a restorative effect include naturality, sense of distance, charm and privacy. The physical-environmental characteristics related to young people’s restoration and their degree of influence were determined through quantitative analysis. Moreover, a prediction model of the environmental restoration effect of pocket parks was established. The research conclusions can provide a reference for the evaluation and comparison of the environmental restoration performance of pocket parks and the design of restorative pocket parks.

The role played by urban greenways in supporting physical activity (PA) for public health benefits has been receiving increasing attention. Most studies on this topic have been conducted in plains, whereas studies in mountainous regions have been limited as a result of the complexity of these areas. To address this knowledge gap, this article aims to analyze the effects of the environmental features for a mountainous urban greenway (MUG) on PA, leading to better support for greenway practice in mountainous areas. A volunteered geographic information (VGI) method was applied through the mobile app KEEP to collect 1314 valid records of PA including its density (total PA distance per unit area within the buffer zone) and attributes (distance, duration and speed) in the Yuzhong Peninsula, Chongqing, China. Similar to those of the studies conducted in the plains, our results showed that PA density was affected by the MUG and its surrounding environment. The key environmental features included residential density, open-space POI, the slope, the transportation-MUG (T-MUG) ratio and the recreational-MUG (R-MUG) ratio. For the PA attributes, the MUG showed stronger effects than the surrounding environment. The key environmental features included the slope and type of MUG, of which the former was negatively associated with distance and speed. The T-MUG ratio was positively related to duration and speed, while the R-MUG ratio was positively related to duration and distance. No association was found between livelihood (L-MUG) and PA. Hence, to support both the PA density and attributes, the environmental qualities for recreation and the types of R-MUGs should be given more consideration in practice.

Residents’ walking trips are a kind of natural motion that promotes health and wellbeing by modifying individual behavior. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the major influence of the spatial elements of a health-supportive environment on residents’ walking trips. This study analyzes residents’ walking trips’ elements based on the spatiotemporal characteristics of walking trips, as well as the spatial elements of a health-supportive environment in residential streets based on residential health needs. To obtain the spatial elements that promote residents’ walking trips and to build an ordered logistic regression model, two methods—a correlation analysis and a logistic regression analysis—were applied to analyze the elements of residents’ walking trips as well as the spatial elements of a health-supportive environment in residential streets by means of SPSS software, using on-site survey results of ten residential streets and 2738 pieces of research data. The research showed that the nine kinds of spatial elements that significantly affect residents’ walking trips are density of pedestrian access, density of bus routes, near-line rate of roadside buildings, average pedestrian access distance, square area within a 500 m walking distance, distance to the nearest garden, green shade ratio, density of street intersections, and the mixed proportion of differently aged residential buildings. In order to construct a spatial environment that promotes walking trips, it is necessary to improve the convenience of residents’ walking trips, to increase the safety of roadside buildings and pedestrian access, to expand the comfort of “getting out to the nature”, and to enrich the diversity of different architectural styles and street density.

People-oriented development has become the main theme of China’s current social development, and the construction of various urban infrastructure has shifted from a focus on functionalism to a continuous pursuit of service quality. As an essential infrastructure for urban transport, urban parking facilities have an impact on pedestrian experience and landscape appearance based on the provision of parking functions. Therefore, this study is oriented to improving the quality of parking facilities, proposes a research framework of parking facilities based on meeting functional demand and service quality, and constructs a quality index to evaluate the quality of parking facilities, which includes three dimensions of evaluation indexes: pedestrian space impact, environmental space impact, and demand matching. By analyzing the current characteristics of urban parking facilities and measuring their quality index (6.5), the study finds that while satisfying the basic function of parking demand, it brings a negative impact on the pedestrian experience and the overall urban landscape appearance of the city. Motivated by this, this study proposes strategies to improve the quality of parking facilities: demand matching, spatial synergy, and environmental design to address parking difficulties, while injecting different ideas for future value orientation of parking facility planning and construction.

Rural ecosystem health (REH) serves as an effective metric for assessing the damage degree and stability state within rural systems and their components. It reflects the interaction and the balance among rural subsystems, emphasizing the harmonious development of resources, agriculture, environment, economy, and society that are fundamental to sustainable rural development. Most regional-scale ecosystem health assessments primarily focus on either the natural state of the ecosystem or external disturbances affecting it, often neglecting human ecological systems characterized by economic and social dimensions. Taking Chongqing as an example, we established an improved REH assessment framework by integrating ecological integrity from the perspective of a social-economy-natural compound ecosystem. Furthermore, we innovatively incorporated the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into the formulation of the REH indicator system to quantitatively elucidate the spatiotemporal characteristics. The results indicated that: (1) The REH in Chongqing exhibited an evolutionary pattern characterized by a subsequent rise, maintaining values between 0.363–0.872 from 2000 to 2018. This trend reflected a distinct two-stage development characteristic, with the rural socio-economic subsystem contributing the most at 33.36%, followed closely by the rural environmental subsystem at 27.84%; (2) In 2018, the REH across the 36 districts and counties in Chongqing displayed spatial differentiation patterns described as “collapse in the west, high levels in the northeast, and localized surges”. The areas ranked from smallest to largest REH were metropolitan, western, southeastern, and northeastern areas; (3) Four levels (e.g., disease, single health, compound health, and comprehensive health) and twelve sub-levels of REH were defined using a dominant factors method. Finally, we analyzed the driving factors from four aspects of urbanization development: policy regulation, urban-rural factors flow, and regional differences. We also proposed differentiated planning and policies for sustainable rural development in Chongqing.