Abstract:
Urbanization has brought half of the world’s population into urban areas while
transforming the way people live, work, travel and building network. Similarly, the
urbanization made a significant impact on lifestyles in urban and sub-urban 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.
