Background: This study aimed to specify the prevalence of sedentary behavior and depression and investigate the relationship between sedentary behavior and depression among college students majoring in design. Methods: A total of 480 undergraduate and postgraduate students majoring in design were randomly enrolled from a university in Nanjing for a questionnaire that included sociodemographic data, physical health, sedentary behavior and depression. Results: Participants reported that they spent 14.93 (SD = 1.76) hours on sedentary behavior per day and most of the time occurred outside the classroom. There were 161 (39.8%) students who reported depression, with a statistical difference across grades. After adjusting for sociodemographic attributes, physical health and physical activity, binary logistic regression analysis showed that the total sedentary time and time spent on school assignments on weekends were significantly associated with depression. Conclusions: To reduce the risk of depression, students majoring in design should be encouraged to change sedentary behaviors to physical activities in their study and life, such as using non-seating postures to do school assignments, making time for more physical activities and reducing assignments on weekends.

The propensity for visiting urban parks is affected by the park’s attractiveness and travel convenience, where walking provides the most basic and fair access. Walking routes from residences to parks, in terms of duration and perception, have received insufficient attention in the literature, particularly in the urban form context in China. Using the case study of Xuanwu Lake Park in Nanjing, we acquire walking routes from residences to the park through open-source data scraping in order to depict the pedestrian shed and pedestrian environment reasonably along these routes. The results show that the walking routes vary significantly with regards to distance, turns, street views, and so on. Proximity to urban parks, in terms of Euclidean distance, does not necessarily correspond to actual route distance, which may have a more direct influence on travel convenience and, hence, visiting propensity. Palpable differences in green visual ratio, image elements, and points of interest along these routes may also contribute to pedestrian environmental disparity. Analyzing data obtained from an online map provides a rapid and objective approach to detect pedestrian sheds and diagnose pedestrian environments, which can facilitate urban planners and policy makers in siting new parks and assessing the service capacity of parks.

In December 2019, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic attacked Wuhan, China. The city government soon strictly locked down the city, implemented a hierarchical diagnosis and treatment system, and took a series of unprecedented pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical measures. The residents’ access to the medical resources and the consequently potential demand–supply tension may determine effective diagnosis and treatment, for which travel distance and time are key indicators. Using the Application Programming Interface (API) of Baidu Map, we estimated the travel distance and time from communities to the medical facilities capable of treating COVID-19 patients, and we identified the service areas of those facilities as well. The results showed significant differences in service areas and potential loading across medical facilities. The accessibility of medical facilities in the peripheral areas was inferior to those in the central areas; there was spatial inequality of medical resources within and across districts; the amount of community healthcare centers was insufficient; some communities were underserved regarding walking distance; some medical facilities could be potentially overloaded. This study provides reference, in the context of Wuhan, for understanding the spatial aspect of medical resources and residents’ relevant mobility under the emergency regulation, and re-examining the coordination of emergency to improve future planning and utilization of medical facilities at various levels. The approach can facilitate policymakers to assess potential loading of medical facilities, identify low-accessibility areas, and deploy new medical facilities. It also implies that the accessibility analysis can be rapid and relevant even only with open-source data.

Summary: The lack of access to public transport is generally considered to be a risk factor for childhood obesity by discouraging active transport and thus physical activity. To explore the association between access to public transport and childhood obesity, we have conducted a systematic literature search in the Cochrane Library, PubMed, and Web of Science for studies published before January 1, 2019. A total of 25 cross‐sectional and two longitudinal studies conducted in 10 countries were identified. Inconsistent findings were identified arising from a great variety of sample characteristics, definitions of exposure (ie, access to public transport), and outcome variables (eg, obesity), and analysis methods. While over half of the studies showed null associations between access to public transport and childhood obesity, we have observed more positive than negative associations among the rest of the studies. These observations suggest that an increased level of access to public transport may have a health‐promoting effect and hence prevent the development of childhood obesity. However, this conclusion needs to be further corroborated in future research on the basis of large‐sample health surveys, in situ observations, and comparative analyses among different study areas.