Exploring Influences Of Built Environment Of Neighborhood On Elder’s Activity-travel

With Chinese entering the so-called aged society, the elder’s physical activities can play an important role on healthy aging. However, built environment of neighborhood which is influenced of the paradigm of modernism planning, is not only difficult to deal with the enormous challenge of population aging, but hinders elder’s daily activity-travel. Now improving elder’s activity-travel to increase their health through adjusting the built environment, has been an important and challenged issue in urban planning area. The key point is to understand the complex relations between the built environment and elder’s activity-travel clearly.Firstly, the research pointed out that building an integrative theoretical framework across a single subject is the most important premise to estimate the influencing mechanism of the built environment on elder’s activity behaviors, after reviewing the domestic and foreign empirical researches and theoretical study on people’s activity-travel behaviors. Secondly, we choose four neighborhoods in Dalian as different typical cases, and analyze the influences of various factors in neighborhood built environment on two kinds of elder’s important physical activities-shopping and leisure behavior, from which to identify the key factors preliminarily. We found that individual characteristic of commercial facilities, topological form of street network, plot scale of land use, and interfacial vitality of public space were associated with trip frequency of elder’s shopping activity; visibility of outdoor places, topological form of street network and street density, land use pattern and diversity, connectivity and selectivity of street space were associated with trip frequency of elders’leisure activities. Finally, we put some suggestions to improve the built environment towards healthy aging, based on the research results.