Relationships Between Jogging Tracks and Stress: Insights from Colombo, Sri Lanka

Abstract

Urbanization has brought half of the world’s population into urban areas while transforming the way people live, work, travel and building networks. Similarly, urbanization made a significant impact on lifestyles in urban and suburban Sri Lanka. However, urbanization often brings stress to people's lives, and jogging has been found as one way of avoiding such busy environments. In Sri Lanka, there are few dedicated tracks for jogging in urban and suburban areas. Unfortunately, the absence of proper design and surroundings of a jogging track may result in increased stress of its users, i.e., joggers. This study examines the impact of design conditions and landscape features of jogging tracks in Sri Lanka towards the level of stress of joggers. We selected two jogging tracks in the capital of Sri Lanka, Sri Jayewardenepura Kotte as our case study. Further, we used online surveys and face to face interviews with joggers as data collection methods. We triangulated our data with experts’ opinions that are gathered from park managers and landscape architects in government authorities. Mixed methods are used to analyse the collected data. Our results identify six main factors that increase the level of stress of joggers, namely, temperature, seeing amphibians in the surrounding, excessive traffic noise, vehicle smoke, dust particles in the atmosphere, and level differences of the jogging tracks. This research further presents a set of recommendations for maintaining, restructuring, and developing jogging tracks in Sri Lanka in order to reduce the stress of joggers.