Research on Health Impact Pathways and Spatial Elements of Urban Streets

Healthy street is the new model of street development and the new direction of street design under the background of inventory planning and healthy city construction. Healthy streets enable streets to give full play to their physical, psychological and social healthy service functions, thereby providing urban residents with a healthy travel environment and healthy lifestyle. Based on the domestic and foreign literature review, this research, from the four aspects of promoting physical activity, improving physical environment, advancing street safety, and enhancing social interaction, puts forward a multi-path and multi-factor comprehensive research idea to discuss the impact pathways of urban streets to promote public health. It also sorts out five spatial elements and measurement indicators of street traffic, interface, space, greening and facilities under various health impact pathways. It illustrates the difference of feature utilities under the health impact pathways of streets, identifies key design elements, and provides a basis and approach for urban design, street design and evaluation through a clear measurement index system. Based on the results of the analysis, it proposes the prospects for future researches from three aspects: expanding the dimension of empirical research on factors, increasing the explanation of causality and mechanism, and exploring the threshold and balance point of indicators under the difference in health goals.