Visual metaphors promote place bonding in urban marathon participation through emotional involvement and spatial meaning reconstruction: a ZMET-PLS-SEM study.

Introduction: Urban marathon participation provides a real-world mass-participation and active leisure setting in which runners perceive environmental cues through continuous bodily movement and visual attention. However, how event-based environmental cues are transformed into emotional involvement, the psychological reconstruction of spatial meaning, and place bonding remains insufficiently explained. Taking the 2025 Wuxi Marathon as a case, this study examines the mechanism through which visual metaphors shape runners' place bonding. Methods: A mixed-methods design was adopted. Study 1 used the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET) with image-elicited interviews of 15 highly involved runners to identify visual metaphor cues and meaning-generation pathways. Study 2 translated the qualitative findings into a PLS-SEM model and tested it using 348 valid questionnaires. Results: Event brand image recognition, landscape-cultural aesthetics, scene transition perception, and order-and-care experience significantly affect event emotional involvement and the psychological reconstruction of urban spatial meaning, which in turn promote place bonding. Urban spatial meaning reconstruction has a stronger effect on place bonding than event emotional involvement, while order-and-care experience plays an important role in linking event participation with urban perception. Discussion: The findings suggest that visual metaphors in urban marathon participation can be understood as a mechanism of place meaning generation. They show how runners transform event-based environmental cues into emotional involvement, the psychological reconstruction of spatial meaning, and place bonding, revealing a place-based pathway related to supportive urban experience and psychological well-being.