The impact of multi-scale built environment on the mental health of older adults:An empirical study of Hefei based on extreme gradient boosting model
The rapid growth of the elderly population,coupled with the increasing risk of chronic diseases and mental health issues brought about by aging,poses increasingly significant challenges to the development of society and the health system.Among them,mental health issues are prone to be overlooked due to their uncertainty and intrinsic nature.Mental health issues have become one of the major factors threatening the quality of life and life satisfaction of the elderly.The rapid urbanization and the accompanying urban diseases and unhealthy lifestyles have brought enormous physical and mental health burdens to residents,especially vulnerable groups including the elderly.In this context,there is an urgent need for all sectors of society to work together to find the most cost-effective ways to promote the physical and mental health of the elderly,in order to reduce the pressure brought by aging and promote"healthy aging"and"active aging".Creating a psychologically healing environment through proactive intervention in the built environment is a key lever to breaking through the mental health crisis of older adults and building a healthy city,which has become an urgent issue of concern for the government and academia.However,few studies have investigated the relative importance of built environments at different scales and their non-linear association with mental health.This study explored the spatial characteristics of the mental health of older adults in Hefei and established a built environment variable system from three scales:urban,community,and residential.It applied the extreme gradient boost(XGBoost)model to analyze the non-linear impact of the multi-scale built environment on the mental health of older adults.Results show that:(1)The mental health status of older adults in Hefei is generally good,and the spatial distribution is decreasing from the old and new city centers to the periphery.(2)In the overall effect analysis,the built environment is an important factor affecting mental health.The relative importance of the built environment at the urban scale is the highest,followed by at the community scale,and that at the residential scale is the lowest.Among the single variables,the contribution values of land use mixing degree,and green space coverage degree were the highest.(3)In the independent effect analysis,the built environment factors of different scales have obvious nonlinear effects and threshold effects on the mental health of older adults.
built environmentmental healthmulti-scaleextreme gradient boosting(XGBoost)Hefei
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
