The importance of community gardens in a healthy urban environment has been extensively documented, while the garden building involving communities has not been much explored in fast-developing cities. This study examines community engagement in garden building activities in a rapid urbanization context, aiming to explore the application of community-engaged research methods for the promotion of neighbourhood environments. The Community Garden Initiative consisting of an array of progressive actions is formulated by the research team, featuring a process of increasing involvement of community members and decreasing intensity of external interventions. These activities have been launched based on community-university partnerships in Shanghai since 2014, synchronising with a transformation of urban regeneration paradigm in China where people-oriented approaches are more emphasized. Five actions covering 70 community gardens are analysed through surveys on participants’ attitudes and perceptions towards the activities. The results of the study presented people’s rapid acceptance of participation in public affairs, reflected possible measures to promote public participation, and confirmed the positive impacts of the garden building on the neighbourhood environmental health as well as on the community-building. Taking into account that residents generally lack the consciousness and capacities required to implement actions at the initial stage of community engagement, we proposed in the conclusion to start with external interventions and capacity buildings carried out by professionals as a supplement to the ‘community-driven’ principle of CBPR methods.

Historic districts have become a significant aspect of urban diversity and sustainable development, due to their dual attributes of cultural heritage and living community. This study aims to assess the influence of conservation efforts on the sustainable development of historic districts. Based on a literature review, this study designed a sustainability evaluation model that included twelve indicators and twenty-seven sub-indicators, in reference to heritage conservation, stakeholder participation, economic development, and planning and governance. The case study of the Xijie Historic District in Dujiangyan City, China, was selected to apply the model. Using data collected via questionnaire surveys and in-depth interviews, and using qualitative and quantitative combined methods and weighted averages, the model produced the sustainability index of the Xijie Historic District. Further examinations were performed and findings were explored, regarding the conservation efforts for the Xijie Historic District. Despite the research limitation of a lack of multi-sample verification, the results of the assessment are consistent with what is found in practice, demonstrating the validity of the model. The sustainability evaluation model can be applied to various historic districts and regions, by reassigning indicator weights to the different cases; the indicators system also provides references for research and practical applications for the conservation and sustainable development of other heritage types.

This study aims to examine the impacts of community gardening on the daily life of residents and the management organisation of pandemic prevention in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, a major public health scourge in 2020. The research team applied a participatory action research approach to work with residents to design and implement the Seeding Plan, a contactless community gardening program. The authors carried out a study to compare the everyday conditions reflecting residents’ mental health of the three subject groups during the pandemic: the participants of the Seeding Plan (Group A), the non-participants living in the same communities that had implemented the Seeding Plan (Group B), and the non-participants in other communities (Group C). According to the results, group A showed the best mental health among the three; Group B, positively influenced by seeding activities, was better than Group C. The interview results also confirmed that the community connections established through gardening activities have a significant impact on maintaining a positive social mentality under extraordinary circumstances. From this, the study concluded that gardening activities can improve people’s mental health, effectively resist negative impacts, and it is a convenient tool with spreading influence on the entire community, so as to support the collective response to public health emergencies in a bottom-up direction by the community.

The role played by urban greenways in supporting physical activity (PA) for public health benefits has been receiving increasing attention. Most studies on this topic have been conducted in plains, whereas studies in mountainous regions have been limited as a result of the complexity of these areas. To address this knowledge gap, this article aims to analyze the effects of the environmental features for a mountainous urban greenway (MUG) on PA, leading to better support for greenway practice in mountainous areas. A volunteered geographic information (VGI) method was applied through the mobile app KEEP to collect 1314 valid records of PA including its density (total PA distance per unit area within the buffer zone) and attributes (distance, duration and speed) in the Yuzhong Peninsula, Chongqing, China. Similar to those of the studies conducted in the plains, our results showed that PA density was affected by the MUG and its surrounding environment. The key environmental features included residential density, open-space POI, the slope, the transportation-MUG (T-MUG) ratio and the recreational-MUG (R-MUG) ratio. For the PA attributes, the MUG showed stronger effects than the surrounding environment. The key environmental features included the slope and type of MUG, of which the former was negatively associated with distance and speed. The T-MUG ratio was positively related to duration and speed, while the R-MUG ratio was positively related to duration and distance. No association was found between livelihood (L-MUG) and PA. Hence, to support both the PA density and attributes, the environmental qualities for recreation and the types of R-MUGs should be given more consideration in practice.