A Study on the Socio-Ecological Determinants of Sports Facility Use in Emerging Urban Areas: Focusing on Jiangbei New District in Nanjing, China

With the acceleration of global urbanization, the equitable allocation and usage of sports facilities have become key indicators for evaluating urban public health and social resilience. However, existing studies have largely focused on traditional urban areas, while emerging urban districts-where social structures are still forming and community cultures are under construction-remain underexplored. To fill this research gap, this study takes Nanjing’s Jiangbei New District as a case and employs the Social Ecological Model to examine the characteristics and influencing mechanisms of residents' use of sports facilities. Findings reveal a clear spatial preference in residents’ participation in physical activity: they tend to favor open, low-threshold spaces such as trails and parks, while avoiding enclosed and specialized facilities. This leads to a narrow range of exercise types and reduced efficiency in facility utilization. Path analysis indicates that behavior change is not directly driven by individual motivation, interpersonal support, or policy incentives, but rather mediated through “community perception” as a key intermediary mechanism. In the proposed model, the community is no longer a passive background variable but serves as a central hub for transforming higher-order drivers into concrete behaviors. Group comparisons further show that younger and male residents are more responsive to individual and community-level incentives, whereas older adults and women rely more heavily on social support networks and a sense of spatial safety. The defining features of emerging urban districts lie in their “present instability” and “future plasticity.” As these districts transition toward maturity, identifying critical mechanisms and embedding policy interventions and spatial optimizations during this formative phase will profoundly influence the institutionalization of health behaviors. The community mediation model proposed in this study responds to the governance challenges of this “structural window period,” extending the applicability of the social ecological model under conditions of weakened social capital, and offering both theoretical insight and empirical pathways for health governance in new urban contexts.