Exploring the Determinants of Residents’ Behavior towards Participating in the Sponge-Style Old Community Renewal of China: Extending the Theory of Planned Behavior

Abstract

In recent years, sponge-style old community renewal (SOCR) has attracted considerable attention as an essential component of urban renewal and sponge city construction in China. As a new method of community governance, the government has increasingly valued residents’ participation in the SOCR. However, as a new concept, the SOCR has not been studied from the perspective of management, and there are few explorations of residents’ participation in the research field. Thus, this study aimed to explore the determinants of residents’ behavior toward participating in the SOCR of China based on the extended theory of planned behavior (TPB), which will further promote residents’ engagement in the SOCR. Data from 1657 respondents were analyzed using the structural equation model (SEM) to verify the direct or indirect relationship between potential variables. The results show that residents’ participation cognition (RPC), attitude (RPA), and intention (RPI) all significantly affect residents’ participation behavior (RPB). The RPC can not only have an indirect impact on the RPB by influencing the RPA but also have an indirect impact on the RPB through the RPA and the RPI. This research not only expands the application boundary of the TPB but also enriches the knowledge system of residents’ participation and the SOCR. Several practical implications for promoting residents’ participation are obtained in the context of the SOCR projects.

Overcoming inertia for sustainable urban development: Understanding the role of stimuli in shaping residents' participation behaviors in neighborhood regeneration projects in China

“…The findings of our study support this view. The positive impact of social norms on residents' participation attitudes and behaviors have also been well documented in previous studies (Gu et al, 2022;Tang et al, 2022). Furthermore, as shown in Table 6 (Section 5.1), the study also indicates that older and longer-term residents are more likely to engage in positive behaviors.…”

“…Some scholars believe that attitude, as an individual psychological state, is the most important factor influencing individual behavior (Tang et al, 2022). The typical approach to assess the attitude of respondents towards a particular behavior is to inquire about their awareness, preference, support, and agreement regarding it (Gu et al, 2022;Lin et al, 2022;Liu et al, 2018;Tang et al, 2022). A positive attitude is associated with a stronger desire to perform specific behaviors, which has been verified in many studies (McConnell and Jacobs, 2020).…”

“…However, most existing studies have failed to take into account the unique characteristic of residents' psychological inertia towards participation. Consequently, previous research has primarily focused on the fundamental logic of "whether or not to participate" (Gu et al, 2022;Lin et al, 2022), rather than exploring "the transitional relationship between old and new participation patterns". Specifically, the former can be regarded as a direct portrayal of the ideal resident participation state, which implies an important premise that, given the opportunity, residents would actively and openly participate in the decision-making process of neighborhood regeneration (Dai et al, 2022).…”

“…Firstly, experts unanimously agreed that the term "political participation" is a specialized concept that may not be easily understood I was involved in the vote on the regeneration plan. (Gu et al, 2022) by residents, potentially leading to misunderstandings and affecting the quality of the questionnaire responses. Secondly, the removal of ATT5 will not compromise the integrity of the questionnaire content.…”

The influence of rural tourism landscape perception on tourists’ revisit intentions—a case study in Nangou village, China

“…First, a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was introduced to test whether the relationship between the factors and the corresponding measurement items was as expected, and to further revise the relationship model between the latent variables and the indicator question items and between the indicator question items (Li and Chen, 2010). Second, the interaction mechanism between the latent variables was analyzed by SEM to verify or falsify the research hypotheses (Gu et al, 2022). Finally, the bootstrap method was used to validate and analyze the indirect effects (Wen and Ye, 2014).…”