Apart from providing essential care for elderly inhabitants, a well addressed purpose of community-based elderly care facilities is to promote social integration through encouraging visitors from the neighbourhood to continuously participate in activities and use services offered by the facility. The location of care facilities and their local environment have been widely argued to constitute a critical factor for older people’s continuous participation, which induces the formation and maintenance of personal networks between the different user groups, as well as a sense of attachment. However, existing literature on care facility location and older people’s participation predominantly uses qualitative methods, and often applied to a single case. This causes ambiguity and controversy when comparing findings from different cases and also makes the generalisation of study findings problematic. This paper introduces a spatial network model which based on Space Syntax theory to explicitly describe spatial relations between care facilities and urban fabric. With a large dataset of social participation records from 91 community-based elderly care facilities in the Chinese city of Nanjing, the study will investigate how differentiated locational properties exert influence on patterns of older people’s social participation. Findings indicate that local-scale spatial properties could influence occurrence patterns of social participation in care facilities, and the mechanism local-scale spatial properties exert influence varies in differentiated global-scale spatial contexts.