Structural Model for Evaluating Spatial Health Indicators of Public Spaces, in Iraq

Abstract

Public spaces are strategic hotspots and energy centers that shape urban life through various activities that can be invested in creating urban vitality and social interaction, leading to healthy urban environments. The importance of public places is at the forefront of sustainable development goals. The city is a complex mixture of built, natural and social environments. Many researches have addressed the concept of healthy environments in general and paid attention to a number of spatial indicators for increasing physical activities, which contribute to enhancing the general health of the population. There were few studies that focused on public spaces as the urban starting point for achieving healthy, vibrant, and active environments. The main objective of the research is to evaluate the indicators of healthy public places using )SEM( technology and build a structural model that can determine the importance and the most influential factor on the quality of healthy urban life, from the point of view of the questionnaire sample in the study area, Al-Wathiq Square. Through structural equations that adopt the partial least squares (PLS) approach. The results showed that the access & linkages index to public places within the urban context comes at the forefront of health indicators for the built environment, followed by the importance of sociability, then uses & activities, and finally the comfort & image index. According to what the study revealed, Iraqi society gave the least importance to the comfort and image index. This explains the ineffectiveness of some public places, even though they have an integrated physical structure.