Outdoor activities in residential communities may promote social interactions between neighbors, helping maintain the residents' physical and mental health. However, it has been said that social interactions in China's residential communities have drastically decreased due to the housing policy change in 1998. This paper aims to elucidate relevant factors of the physical environment that enhance residents' outdoor activities via an intensive survey in four newly developed residential communities in Tianjin. Prior to the intensive survey, 33 representative subspaces of all outdoor spaces were defined. For each subspace, the residents' staying activities as well as passing activities were observed 10 times where each session lasted between 10-20 minutes (morning and afternoon on three weekdays and two weekends), providing a total of 7668 behaviors. For the physical environment, we postulated three physical factors, accessibility, facility, spatial configuration; and defined five, four, and two variables, respectively. Linear regression analysis using these variables reveals that the magnitude of the effects of physical factors varies by activity categories including all activities, occasional stoppings, sedentary activities and vigorous activities. The results of this study provide basic knowledge on the design of residential communities to promote staying activities.
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