Study On The Influence Of Perceieved Living Street Environmental Characteristics On Mental Health Of Residents

Street is All kinds of malpractices caused by rapid urbanization in China make residents in an increasingly serious state of sub-health.Street is the place carrying the daily perception and social activities of urban residents,and its impact on the mental health needs to be studied systematically and deeply.However,at present,there are many influential studies of macro-built environment on mental health,while those of street environment have not yet formed a complete indicator system,and the internal influencial mechanism is still lack of exploration.In this study,7 residential blocks in the main urban area of Harbin were selected,and residents living on both sides of living streets were investigated by surveys.Based on the existing research,16 specific street physical environmental characteristics and 3 street social environmental characteristics were selected.A multi-layer regression model was used to establish a quantitative relationship between these perceived street environmental characteristics and two independent indicators of residents' mental health(positive mental health and psychological distress),so as to determine the impact of perceived street environment on residents' mental health.Meanwhile,a simple mediation model was adopted to test the mediating effect of street social environment characteristics between street physical environment characteristics and mental health,so as to deeply explore the internal mechanism of the influence.The results show that the characteristics of environmental quality,building function and street facilities have an important impact on positive mental health,while the external characteristics of buildings had an important impact on mental distress.Higher vehicle concentration and more unit doors open to the street have the greatest negative effect on residents' mental health.The results verify the mediating effect of neighborhood social environment--neighborhood communication,neighborhood trust and neighborhood support,but the mediating effect was small.The three external features of the building,such as the degree of building continuity,mainly reduce the risk of psychological distress by increasing neighborhood trust,while the numbers of unit doors open to the street has the opposite effect.Higher functional richness of the building and a greater number of rest facilities promote positive mental health by promoting neighborhood communication,trust,and support.Finally,by analyzing the priority of optimizing the street physical environment,this study proposed the short-term and long-term optimization strategies for the residential streets in downtown Harbin,in order to better play the social and psychological health benefits of the street environment.