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The purpose of this paper is to examine Czech traditions of outdoor games and sports, turistika activities and education in nature programmes, which have continued to develop during periods of oppression and provided opportunities to preserve the Czech culture.

A review of the historical, cultural and political context of education in nature traditions in Czech was proposed.

Late 19th century organisations such as the Turistický klub and Sokol were instrumental in developing a range of indigenous turistika activities involving active movement. The early 20th century influences were the Czech scouting movement, summer camps and Woodcraft. Charles University provided the first tertiary outdoor educational programmes in Prague in the 1950s. Their foundation course “Turistika and Outdoor Sports” is still compulsory for all students studying physical education and sport. Turistika activities and outdoor sports and games continued to be developed throughout the liberalization of the socialist regime in the 1960s.

Following the Prague Spring in 1968, and under the guise of the Socialist Youth Union organization, new experimental forms of outdoor education emerged.

Since the Velvet Revolution in 1989 organisations have reconnected with Czech outdoor traditions that flourished before 1948 and other organisations have developed education in nature programs. The commercial sphere, which did not exist before 1989, has now been established in the outdoor area. However, traditional participation in turistika activities has been impacted by other external motivations as a broader range of opportunities have become available and accepted, and tourism outside of Czech and Europe has become increasingly popular and accessible.

The originality of this paper is to provide an overview of Czech political and cultural history and how it has shaped people's relationship, particularly children and youth, with the outdoors.

This paper aims to understand how the Covid-19 pandemic has changed consumers’ perceptions of outdoor consumption categories, such as retail shopping, eating out, public events and travel and how these perceptions may impact businesses in these domains in the long term. Further, this research aims to understand demographic effects on outdoor consumption inhibition during the current pandemic and discuss how businesses can use these insights to rebrand their offerings and evolve after the pandemic.

Data collected by CivicScience, a survey-based consumer intelligence research platform, during April–July 2020 forms the basis of the preliminary analysis, where the chi-square test has been used to examine significant differences in consumer attitudes between different age groups, income groups and genders. Further, a social media analysis of conversations around outdoor consumption activities is undertaken to understand the rationale behind these demographics-based attitude differences.

Results lend varying degrees of support to the hypothesized consumer attitudes toward outdoor consumption activities during the Covid-19 pandemic. As the pandemic wore on, older (vs younger), female (vs male) consumers and lower (vs higher) income-group consumers had reportedly higher inhibition toward different outdoor activities. Older individuals were significantly less likely to shop, dine and attend public events than younger individuals. Lower-income consumers were significantly less likely to dine and travel than higher-income consumer consumers. Female consumers were significantly less likely to shop and travel than male consumers. Social media scan of conversations suggests that differences in perceived health and financial risks may have resulted in demographics-based differences in outdoor consumption activities.

This study contributes to the literature by understanding demographic differences in consumer participation in outdoor activities. One limitation is that due to the time-sensitive nature of the pandemic research, further studies could not be conducted to understand the implications of other variables, beyond demographics that influence consumer behavior during a crisis. A future research direction is to understand how other psychological variables or traits, influence health and financial risk-taking behavior during a similar crisis.

The principal contribution of the present research is that it tests the risk-taking theory in the context of outdoor consumption during the Covid-19 pandemic. The present research has implications for businesses as they continue to evolve during and post Covid-19.

Preschoolers and their inter-generational parents are the main users of modern urban residential outdoor space. To design and build appropriate outdoor space, it is necessary to understand the two groups’ psychological and behavioral needs in depth. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

By means of literature reviews, field surveys, questionnaires, and interviews, this study addresses the psychological, behavioral, neighborhood conversation, and space use characteristics of preschoolers and their inter-generational parents in the residential quarters of Haidian District in Beijing. This paper investigates the safety, interests, micro-climate appropriateness, supporting accompanying behavior, and promoting neighborhood conversation as the design strategies for residential outdoor space.

The findings suggest that children’s wills are dominant in choosing activity space, while the duration of stay is decided by inter-generational parents; appropriateness for children’s use is the most significant indicator for evaluating satisfaction of outdoor space; safety is the first rule in outdoor space design; and the design of details in outdoor space and facilities needs to be strengthened.

Some preliminary conclusions have been concluded in this research while some deficiencies still exist. For example, quantitative research method and data processing method need to be deepened and studied continually in the following research; also, the research defines the investigation elements based on literature reading and individual field research, which remains to be verified and deepened in the future.

This research paid attention to usage experience in residential quarters so as to get rid of the pursuit of beauty in form in the planning and design strategies for residential quarters, proper care for youth and seniors, promote community vitality, enhance the shared living environment, and promote community association. This research can arouse the attention to children and the elderly in subsequent residential quarters and urban research. It is a very important field to study the behavior characteristics of children and the elderly and then study the urban space that is suitable for them.

Planning and design strategies for residential quarters should be explored from the perspectives of the correlated group of preschoolers and their inter-generational parents – the group of people who most frequently use residential outdoor space. This research paid attention to usage experience in residential quarters so as to get rid of the pursuit of beauty in form in the planning and design strategies for residential quarters, proper care for youth and seniors, promote community vitality, enhance the shared living environment, and promote community association. This research can arouse the attention to children and the elderly in subsequent residential quarters and urban research.

This research is of great significance, in caring the young and the old, building up communities’ vitality, enhancing living environment, and promoting community association, to explore planning and design strategies for residential quarters from the perspective of the correlated group of preschoolers and inter-generational parents and the group of people who uses the residential quarters’ space most frequently.

Recognizing daily life activities and human behaviour from contextual information is a challenging task. The purpose of the research work in this paper is to develop a system that can detect indoor and outdoor daily life activities of low entropy mobile people such as elderly people and patients with regular routines using non-intrusive sensor and contextual information.

A framework is proposed that utilises a hierarchical approach in which high-level activities are divided into sub-activities and tasks and recognises the high-level outdoor and indoor activities of daily life. Tasks are recognised at lower level from sensor data and then used by the “activity recogniser” at higher level to recognise the high-level activities. For outdoor activities recognition, wireless proximity data are used, whereas for indoor activities, object usage data obtained through radio frequency identification sensors are used.

For outdoor tasks, results have shown 100 per cent recognition for experiment 1 and a decrease in recognition from 100 to 82.7 per cent, respectively, for experiment 2-9 due to increase in the entropy of individual tasks. Outdoor activity recognition ranges from 84.1 to 100 per cent. For indoor tasks, generating alternative tasks sequences approach effectively recognised the single tasks that were conducted with objects without any order. Average indoor activity recognition rate remains above 90 per cent. The reason why this approach is able to detect the activities without their distinct features is the planning capability of the Asbru that is used in the modelling of high-level activities.

The novelty of this research work is a framework that utilises different types of sensor data and recognises both indoor and outdoor daily life activities of individuals.

Outdoor education was first included in the formal (written) curriculum for New Zealand schools in 1999. This article explores New Zealand outdoor education as a product of a particular coincidence of social and economic conditions and the contested domais of pedagogy and curriculum during the period 1935‐1965. Popkewitz, among others, views school curricula and associated practices as emerging from ‘systems of ideas that inscribe styles of reasoning, standards and conceptual distinctions’ which ‘shape and fashion interpretation and action’. It is these ‘systems of ideas’, or ‘traditions’ in Goodson and Marsh’s terms, that provide a framework for understanding outdoor education in New Zealand schools. Since the 1930s, outdoor education in New Zealand appears to have consolidated from, and been shaped by, competing educational ideologies and changing social and economic influences. The way in which outdoor education accommodated competing traditions is the focus of this, necessarily broad, analysis

The emergence of smart wearables using clothing as a technology platform is a significant milestone with considerable implications for industrial convergence, creating new value for fashion. This paper aimed to present a premeditated prototype to integrate a human activity recognition (HAR) system into outdoor clothing.

For the development of wearable HAR (WHAR) clothing, this paper explored three subject areas: fashion design related to the structural feature of the clothing platform, electronics related to wearable circuits and modules design and graphic user interface design related to smartphone application development.

For WHAR functions in outdoor terrains, the coexistence of accelerometer–gyroscope sensing and distance-sensing could be practical to surpass the technological limitation of activity and posture recognition with gyro sensors highly depending on the changes of acceleration and angles.

Through the vital sign check and physical activity–change recognition function, this study's WHAR system allows users to check their health by themselves and avoid overwork. A quick rescue is possible manually and automatically in a dangerous situation by notifying others. Thus, it can help protect users' health and safety (life).

This study designed the modularization of HAR functions generally installed in indoor medical spaces. Through the approach, smart clothing–embracing WHAR systems optimized for health and safety care for outdoor environments was pursued to diversify expensive roles of clothing for technological applications.

The benefits of “green dementia care”, whereby people living with dementia are supported to connect with nature, are increasingly being recognised. Evidence suggests that these benefits span physical, emotional and social spheres and can make a significant contribution towards quality of life. However, care settings often present specific challenges to promoting such connections due to a range of factors including risk-averse cultures and environmental limitations. The purpose of this paper is to report on a project that aims to explore the opportunities, benefits, barriers and enablers to interaction with nature for people living with dementia in residential care and extra care housing schemes in the UK.

Data were gathered from 144 responses to an online survey by managers/staff of extra care housing schemes and care homes in the UK. In depth-case studies were carried out at three care homes and three extra care housing schemes, involving interviews with residents, staff and family carers.

A wide variety of nature-based activities were reported, both outdoor and indoor. Positive benefits reported included improved mood, higher levels of social interaction and increased motivation for residents, and greater job satisfaction for staff. The design and layout of indoor and outdoor spaces is key, in addition to staff who feel enabled to promote connections with nature.

This paper is based on a relatively small research project in which the participants were self-selecting and therefore not necessarily representative.

The paper makes some key recommendations for good practice in green dementia care in extra care housing and care homes.

Outdoor activities can promote social interaction for people living with dementia in care settings. The authors’ findings are relevant to the recent policy focus on social prescribing.

The paper makes some key recommendations for good practice in green dementia care in extra care housing and care homes.

This paper aims to synthesize the published literature regarding the impact of environmental design on the improvement of elderly residents’ physical activity.

To provide convergent evidence about the association between facility design/management and physical activity of elderly population, searches were conducted in the PubMed and Google Scholar databases, as well as in specific active living design journals such as Applied Gerontology, Aging and Physical Activity, Housing for the Elderly and Sports Sciences. The inclusion criteria for the final list were the articles that were qualitative, quantitative and mixed-methods studies as well as systematic reviews; written in English; related to the built environmental design; wholly or partially focused on physical activity in elderly population; and published in peer-reviewed journals between 1984 and 2019.

Overall, 30 studies were included in the final list. The results of this review demonstrate that design interventions can raise physical functioning inside and outside of long-term residential facilities. Increasing opportunities for walkable spaces and reducing physical barriers can result in higher levels of physical activity for the elderly population.

This systematic review discloses the design strategies to enhance the level of physical activity by the elderly population based on the findings of the published literature. Overall space layout and accessibility to outdoor walkable spaces were addressed to generally promote the moderate levels of physical activity in elderly population.

Increasing opportunities for walkable spaces and reducing physical barriers result in higher level of activity for the elderly population. Corridor design and interior design ergonomic considerations were highlighted in the literature. Space layout and accessibility to outdoor walkable spaces promote the moderate levels of physical activity.

Environmental design considerations are unique aspects of enhancement of activity level in the elderly population.

This systematic review discloses the design strategies to enhance the level of physical activity by the elderly population based on the findings of the published literature. Overall space layout and accessibility to outdoor walkable spaces were addressed to generally promote the moderate levels of physical activity in elderly population.

The residents of Baghdad city has been suffering from various issues, including poor social relations, low quality of life, as well as neglect of many public spaces and small parks. Therefore, there is a need to devise effective alternatives to compensate for the loss of large public open spaces so as to enhance the residents’ social interactions and other social activities. Having that said, this study identified the types and characteristics of public open spaces to enhance residents’ social activities in Baghdad city.

This study adopted the questionnaire survey method to gather quantitative data from 306 respondents based on the single-stage random procedure. The targeted population of this study refers to the residents of the Karkh district, the western part of Baghdad.

The study outcomes highlight the need to provide pocket parks with adequate characteristics to promote the residents’ social interactions in Baghdad city.

This study contributes by emphasizing the significance of establishing pocket parks for social interaction in Baghdad City.

The study shows a number of solutions related to pocket parks by studying the critical actionable attributes that can be embedded into new development, land-use policies, or to upgrade existing parks. The study may serve as a useful reference for urban and landscape planners, architects, social psychologists, the Municipal of Baghdad, and other interested researchers in this field.

Traditionally, in Palestine, outdoor spaces played a crucial role in organizing and improving the living quality of the living units, while this important role in modern housing design is lost by a stark separation between internal and private external spaces (balconies, verandas and yards). This separation is disconnecting private inside and outside spaces whereas in the traditional courtyard houses there was a continuity between the inside and the outside. This paper investigates the socio-environmental criteria and characteristics of private outdoor spaces that could play an improving role in the living quality of future housing design. So, a comparative study between contemporary and traditional outdoor spaces characteristics was carried out in two different cities in two different climatic zones of Palestine. The contemporary housing was evaluated by conducting a survey over 300 dwellings of different housing typologies (detached houses/apartment flats), while the characteristics of traditional design were analyzed from the old historical part of these cities. The results of this paper demonstrate that the private outdoor space is a major contributor to enhance housing sustainability. It presents the distinctive qualities of courtyard concept, which ought to be reintroduced consciously into the design of future housing in order to improve the living quality. The paper also identifies the most important factors that ensure those qualities and forms the basis for further research.