Designing for Well-Being: Exploring Older Adults’ Preferences in Community Green Space Design

Amid rapid urbanization and population aging, the age-friendly design of community green spaces is pivotal in enhancing older adults’ quality of life and fostering cultural ecosystem services and social harmony. Community green spaces provide recreational environments, promote neighborhood interactions, and significantly contribute to improving community well-being. This study explores the optimization of age-friendly designs for community green spaces, aiming to offer insights for urban planners and stakeholders. Findings reveal that many public green spaces fail to adequately address older adults’ needs, limiting their usage due to insufficient age-friendly features. Innovatively, this research integrates older adults’ sense of well-being into the design framework of community green spaces. Through surveys and case studies, we collected data on users’ perceptions of age-friendly designs and employed structural equation modeling to analyze the factors influencing well-being. The results indicate that the integration of digital technologies and accessibility design has the most significant impact on older adults’ well-being, with digital tools enhancing the convenience and safety of green space usage; Social interaction and functional designs also exhibit significant positive effects, demonstrating that open activity spaces and well-designed, accessible rest areas substantially improve older adults’ sense of belonging and comfort;The impact of safety design on well-being is relatively weak, suggesting that existing safety facilities may already be sufficient, or that older adults' sense of security involves more complex psychological factors. Further clarification of the cognitive structure of“sense of security”is needed.