EVALUATION AND DETERMINANTS OF THE SOCIAL INTEGRATION EFFECTIVENESS OF URBAN COMMUNITY SPORTS SPACES

Abstract

Against the backdrop of ongoing urbanization and the deepening of community-based governance, urban community sports spaces serve not only as important venues for residents’ physical activity and leisure, but also as everyday public spaces with the potential to foster neighborhood interaction, strengthen community ties, and promote social integration. From the perspective of social integration, this study examines the social integration effectiveness of urban community sports spaces, with particular attention to its conceptual meaning, dimensional structure, and key influencing factors. First, the study clarifies the notion of social integration in community sports spaces and conceptualizes social integration effectiveness along three core dimensions: interaction, social relationships, and identity/participation. Second, based on questionnaire survey data, field observations, and interview materials, the study analyzes the overall performance of social integration effectiveness in urban community sports spaces. The findings indicate that such spaces play a relatively strong role in facilitating everyday contact and interaction among residents, but remain more limited in promoting deeper relationship building, community identification, and sustained public participation. Overall, social integration effectiveness exhibits a declining pattern from surface-level interaction to deeper forms of integration. Further analysis suggests that social integration effectiveness is not an automatic outcome of spatial existence itself, but rather the combined result of spatial conditions, governance support, and residents’ usage behavior. In particular, accessibility, openness, facility adequacy, safety, and comfort provide the basic conditions; governance-related factors such as activity organization, rule guidance, and community organizational involvement play an important facilitating role; and residents’ frequency of use, duration of stay, and degree of joint participation directly shape the realization of integration outcomes. The study argues that future development of urban community sports spaces should place greater emphasis on their social and public functions, and should more fully release their integrative potential through improvements in spatial environment, organizational governance, and the quality of social interaction.