Cold-region community outdoor spaces are not only everyday activity settings for older adults in winter, but also public-space types that need to be translated into design evidence for architecture and healthy human-settlement research. Existing restorative-environment studies usually treat improved mood, perceived restoration, and environmental appraisal as evidence of health benefits. The key finding of this study is that subjective restoration and physiological recovery are not always synchronized after outdoor exposure in cold-region communities. This discordance reveals a design risk and an innovative value that can be overlooked when restoration is evaluated only through perception-based indicators. Based on a winter field exposure experiment with 345 older adults in a community in Shenyang, China, this study compared staged changes in systolic blood pressure (SBP), diastolic blood pressure (DBP), pulse pressure (PP), POMS, ROS, and ENPQ across an activity plaza, a greenway walkway, and a street corridor. It further developed a psychophysiological concordance classification and a residual cardiovascular risk indicator for the recovery period. The greenway walkway showed the most stable concordant recovery, with 86.84% of women and 79.35% of men showing concordant recovery. The activity plaza showed a clear pattern of emotional recovery: the proportions of women and men whose psychological state improved without a synchronized SBP decrease were 61.58% and 50.32%, respectively. The street corridor had the highest recovery-failure rates, at 92.63% for women and 91.61% for men. Among women, 90.53% reached SBP values of 140 mmHg or higher during the walking phase in the street corridor, and 59.47% remained above this risk threshold during recovery. These results show that health evaluation of cold-region community outdoor spaces should not rely only on subjective restoration indicators, but should also include psychophysiological concordance and residual risk after exposure. The study translates site health effects into three architectural design judgments: concordant-restoration spaces, emotional-restoration spaces, and recovery-failure spaces, providing a testable evidence framework for age-friendly community renewal, path organization, green buffering, and winter wind-protection design.

Climate non-stationarity and intensifying extreme rainfall challenge flood-risk assessment in cold-region old industrial cities, where renewal must work within an established built fabric. Conventional assessments apply fixed indicator weights and thresholds derived from a single design event, although the factors controlling inundation and their response positions can shift with rainfall intensity. This study examines 208 urban green-space plots within Shenyang’s Third Ring Road, combining plot-level field sampling, GIS-based spatial indicators, and maximum inundation depths simulated for 1-, 3-, 10-, 30-, and 50-year return periods. Four analyses were applied along a common scenario axis: indicator screening defined the factor set; multi-group structural equation modeling characterized shifts in latent-variable paths; random forests with permutation importance ranked observed factors; partial dependence analysis located response breakpoints; and XGBoost-SHAP described sample-level contributions. All predictive results are reported from 30 repeated train–test splits with uncertainty intervals. Screening reduced 59 candidate indicators to 13 key factors. The diagnostic evidence indicates a mechanism-shift interval between the 10- and 30-year return periods: the structural path from spatial-pattern resistance to inundation becomes significant from the 10-year scenario, the total effect of surface-cover pressure first exceeds that of vertical storage capacity in the same scenario group, and the response breakpoint of impervious surface ratio tightens from about 58% to about 33% within this interval. Predictive importance is dominated by grey infrastructure density, green infrastructure density, and catchment radius in all scenarios. Renewal priorities therefore vary with rainfall intensity: internal storage and infiltration under regular rainfall, joint surface-cover and catchment control within the shift interval, and coordinated grey–green system responses under extreme scenarios. These findings are diagnostic and predictive, and retrofit benefits require experimental or quasi-experimental validation. The framework offers a methodological reference for further local calibration in comparable cold-region old industrial cities.