Building sustainable slow communities: the impact of built environments on leisure-time physical activities in Shanghai

In today’s world, creating safe, comfortable, and beautiful slow communities has become an urgent research topic for addressing energy crises, environmental pollution, and traffic congestion. This study explored the relationship between the built environment and residents’ leisure-time physical activities in slow communities in Shanghai. This study uses the analytic hierarchy process and entropy weight method to construct a new evaluation model to explore the sustainability mechanism. The results of the study are as follows. First, women participated in walking, jogging, and bicycling activities at a higher rate than men. Second, various leisure-time physical activities have different requirements for the built environment. Third, the built environment of slow communities in Shanghai shows a “pyramid” type of spatial stratification phenomenon. This study contributes to a new evaluation system and optimization model for promoting leisure-time physical activities, providing theoretical and methodological guidance for constructing livable slow communities in developing countries and promoting slow living.