Exploring the Impacts of Urban Built Environments Characteristics on the Public Health of Citizens with an Emphasis on Land Use Mix (Case Study: Mashhad City)

Document Type : Original Article

Author

hadi hosseini

https://doi.org/10.22067/jgusd.2021.47924.0

Abstract

This study seeks to investigate the effect of land use mixing as one of the components of the artificial environment on the general health of people in Mashhad. The type of research is applied-developmental and falls under the category of case studies, survey and correlation. Herfindahl-Herschmann-Frank and Shannon entropy methods were used to measure user mixing. The statistical population of the study includes 25 year-old citizens and older in Mashhad and the sample size is equal to 1022 samples. The required data were collected from 16 neighborhoods of Mashhad. The results showed that in the studied areas, the expectation that land use mixing could have positive effects on the general health of individuals as well as physical activity and walking of citizens had not been materialized. Based on the findings, there was no significant relationship between land use mixing with physical activity and daily walking. In contrast, the findings showed a significant but negative correlation between land use mixing with public health. This means that by increasing the land use mixing score in the target areas, the quality of public health would decrease. In fact, given the different results of this research compared to the international findings mainly about the cities of developed western countries and the serious lack of experimental local studies and the novelty of research related to urban health planning in Iran, the results of this study should never be generalized to other cities in Iran, and it is thus necessary to conduct some more empirical studies on Iranian cities.

Keywords

Built Environment

Land Use Mix

Public Health

Mashhad

20.1001.1.25383531.1400.8.1.1.5

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References

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