The effect of the street environment on two types of essential physical activity in industrial neighborhoods from the perspective of public health: a study from the Harbin low-income population health survey, China

A large number of low-income residents in industrial neighborhoods rarely engage in recreational and physical activities in green spaces in extremely cold weather. This study mainly explores the relationship between the street environment and physical activities under special industrial properties and extreme cold weather conditions. In addition, we further divide essential physical activity into two categories, life-type and traffic-type physical activity, to explore and refine the related studies.

We use principal component analysis to classify the street environment indicators and use multiple linear regression to analyze the impact of each indicator on different physical activities. The conclusions are as follows. For low-income people, the street environment in industrial neighborhoods has a much greater impact on life-type physical activity than traffic-type physical activity, and there is a conflict between the two. In addition, a high greening density is not conducive to either type of physical activity in the street environment. It reduces the paved area of streets and create sports conflicts between people undertaking different physical activities. The findings contribute to the development and optimization of public health research on environmental interventions in industrial neighborhood streets and enable effective recommendations for increasing outside physical activity among low-income people in severe weather conditions. In future studies, we will use the physical environment as a mediator to explore the relationship between the street environment and high-frequency chronic diseases in old industrial neighborhoods.