City Walks in and Around Historic Areas: Insights from an Environmental-Behavioral System Design Perspective

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-511-9_36How to use a DOI?

Keywords

City Walk; Historic Area; Environmental-Behavioral System Design; Yangtze River Delta Region

Abstract

Historic areas are vital carriers of urban culture and collective memory. They attract both residents and visitors through the integration of cultural, commercial, and tourism functions. In recent years, City Walk has emerged as a popular urban experience, with participants exploring and sharing diverse routes. Understanding City Walk practices and their associated routes within historic areas has therefore become a meaningful subject of inquiry. This study adopts the framework of Environmental-Behavioral System Design (EBSD) to analyze City Walk routes in three districts of the Yangtze River Delta region: Huangpu District in Shanghai, Gusu District in Suzhou, and Gulou District in Nanjing. It draws on integrative perspectives of both environmental–behavioral considerations and internal–external dimensions of thinking. The study develops an initial understanding of City Walk as a practice that combines exploratory and purposeful elements, and generates insights into how City Walk routes describe and facilitate interactive experiences between people and historic areas. The contributions of this research are twofold: (1) at the theoretical level, it helps to understand City Walk and its routes from an EBSD perspective; and (2) at the practical level, it provides preliminary ideas for urban planners, tourism content creators, and others engaged in the design of City Walk routes.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Maoen He
AU  - Ziyi Jiang
AU  - Shuling Zhou
AU  - Chang Liu
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/12/31
TI  - City Walks in and Around Historic Areas: Insights from an Environmental-Behavioral System Design Perspective
BT  - Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Literature, Art and Human Development (ICLAHD 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 314
EP  - 322
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-511-9_36
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-511-9_36
ID  - He2025
ER  -