Urban streets are expected to support everyday health in high-density cities, yet evidence on what makes them jogging-friendly is limited. City jogging blends exercise, socializing, and urban exploration, and smartphones and wearable devices capture fine-grained traces of runner–street interactions. Using Beijing as a case, this study links emotion, jogging behavior, and street environments to inform planning. We analyze 66,983 Keep jogging trajectories from the past five years within Beijing’s Fifth Ring Road, a high-density inner-city area, and 968 public online narratives. A contribution-based semantic network analysis, combined with affective cues, identifies four runner profiles: routine fitness, urban exploration, social running, and performance training. Trajectory clustering summarizes route forms. We relate street-level jogging intensity to walkability, transit and park access, development intensity and streetscape greenery visibility. Random-forest regression with Shapley explanations assesses factor importance and potential nonlinear relationships. Findings are as follows: First, emotion-related jogging shows distinct spatial preferences. Restorative runs concentrate in parks and neighborhood loops, exploration-oriented runs gravitate to historic districts and landmark corridors, and training runs favor continuous corridors such as ring roads. Second, higher commercial and social node density aligns with better street runnability, while very high development intensity and isolated segments with high greenery visibility tend to coincide with lower jogging intensity. Building on these patterns, we outline a portfolio approach to street renewal—neighborhood health loops, cultural exploration corridors, and training-efficient corridors—supported by service nodes, safer crossings, and improved visual permeability to sustain everyday health behavior and street-level vitality.

Authors:
Yuanchen Zhao, Tsinghua University, China
Xiaoqing Cheng, Tsinghua University, China

About the Presenter(s)
Yuanchen Zhao is a PhD candidate at Tsinghua University School of Architecture and joint PhD researcher at Politecnico di Torino. Interests include urban renewal, healthy and age-friendly cities, and human factors for older adults’ mental wellbeing.

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