Willingness to Share Urban Parks with Dogs: Perceived Conflict and Behavioural Cognitions in Shanghai

Dog ownership is rising quickly across dense Asian cities, coinciding with increasing competition for scarce urban green space. However, the cognitive factors associated with residents’ acceptance of human–dog shared park use remain poorly understood. Most existing evidence comes from low-density cities that rely on dedicated off-leash dog parks and therefore provides limited insight into dense, multi-use park systems where spatial segregation is difficult to implement. This study examines and tests a model of public acceptance of human–dog shared use in Shanghai, integrating the Stimulus–Organism–Response (S-O-R) paradigm with the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB). PLS-SEM was applied to 1045 cross-sectional intercept-survey responses collected across 229 parks in all 16 districts of Shanghai. Perceived risk and incivility were negatively associated with attitude toward shared use, whereas perceived social friction was not significantly associated with attitude. The two conflict constructs explained 12.5% of the variance in attitude. Attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavioural control made positive and statistically significant formative contributions to the higher-order pro-sharing cognition composite (PSC). PSC was strongly and positively associated with acceptance intention (β = 0.796) and explained 63.3% of its variance. The findings suggest that acceptance intention is associated with a multidimensional pro-sharing cognitive orientation encompassing favourable evaluation, perceived social approval, and perceived manageability. Supplementary variance decomposition indicated that ATT, SN, and PBC made broadly balanced contributions to the model’s explanatory power. The study provides a locally adapted analytical framework for examining human–dog shared park acceptance and offers a basis for comparative research in other high-density cities.

© 2026 by the authors