Citation

Zhang B, Dong Y, Kelobonye K, Zhou RZ, Xu Z. Appl. Spat. Anal. Policy 2023; 16(2): 729-749.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2023, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.1007/s12061-022-09499-3

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Public sports facilities, featuring exercise equipment and athletic facilities as well as professional support services, serve as a critical exercising and active living hub for citizens. Regarded as a component of public welfare, their distribution usually plays an integral role in urban planning for healthy and active cities. Ensuring that these facilities are located within a reasonable walking distance is crucial for encouraging people to visit them; hence, planners must consider walking distance when evaluating the rationale for these facilities' existing and proposed distribution. Using Nanjing, China as a case study, we employed the Baidu Maps online mapping service to implement a city-scale catchment delineation of public sports facilities. We scraped the shortest walking routes between residents' homes and the public sports facilities to delineate the walking catchments, then combined population data to explore the potential gaps between demands and needs. The results revealed significant differences in service areas and potential service capabilities across the sports facilities, demonstrating spatial inequity of sports resources and an insufficient number of public sports facilities in the study area. The walking accessibility of facilities in the peripheral areas was inferior to that of facilities in the central areas, which were expected to be overloaded with a citizen population. If implemented, the proposed plan would remediate this inequity to some extent, but considerable areas outside of 15-min catchments would persist in the study area. These findings highlight the spatial inequity of sports facilities within the city, in both the existing and proposed situation, implying disparities in physical activity opportunities among citizens. Such a straightforward estimation, reinforced with a big data approach, will prove useful for planners and policymakers, although it remains rarely adopted in China for supporting active city planning, and it will be transferable to other cities as a means of rapid assessment.

Language: en

Keywords

Accessibility; GIS; Open-source data; Public sports facilities; Walking catchment