What if instead of only getting physical activity by planning it into your day, your living environment helped plan your physical activity for you? We are not just talking about climbing the stairs to your front door or pulling the garbage cans to the curb, but entire neighborhoods and communities specifically designed to promote walking and bicycling, while decreasing the number of miles logged in automobiles. Welcome to the idea of “livability agenda”, that is using the built environment to influence social behavior. It has also been referred to as “the new urbanism” or “smart growth”. The concept is an exciting and emergent development in healthy living fueled by a synergy between the fields of transportation policy, urban planning, environmental policy and healthcare.

A developing body of research over the last 20 years has been exploring the relationship between community land use and physical activity. What is being discovered is that with the increase in suburban sprawl, people are living at a greater distance from areas of town with commercial establishments, commuter transportation, office buildings, and other types of mixed land use. Additionally, the suburbs have less population density, or houses per acre, increasing the travel time necessary to interact with other community members. As a result, the activities of walking and cycling to accomplish the utilitarian tasks of daily living are not feasible. In effect, many communities have been planned unwittingly in ways that engineer every day physical activity out of the lives of their residents (1).

Research studies in the urban planning field have concluded that a move towards suburban living has led to increased overall usage of motor vehicles. Conversely, studies have shown that in more mixed use neighborhoods, residents log less miles in their vehicles per year. In mixed neighborhoods, houses have more proximity to the commercial and commuter centers of towns, the routes to get there are less meandering and more direct, population density is higher, and traffic tends to move more slowly(2). Such neighborhoods are labeled as having a “high walkability”. Indeed, studies have shown that residents of mixed communities walk or cycle 1-2 additional times per week as part of accomplishing their daily tasks(1). Similarly, research in Atlanta, Georgia, concluded the probability of obesity was 4.7% lower in walkable neighborhoods with a higher proportion of mixed land use(3). These statistical differences, although not as dramatic as some stories of individual behavioral intervention and weight loss, are ,nonetheless, profound. Whereas individual behavioral changes are hard to maintain over time, a better built environment can produce relatively permanent shifts in physical activity and overall health across a large population(1).

As the physical landscapes of more communities are studied, additional information will be gathered on what informs the decisions of individuals to walk, bike or drive and how these decisions are impacted by age, gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic levels and psychosocial attitudes. The relationship between planned community and physical activity will also include an assessment of other aspects of built environment such as the safety of the neighborhood, continuous trails, bike lanes and sidewalks, the accessibility of parks and recreation centers, air quality, neighborhood aesthetics, and topography. Armed with an increasing body of knowledge, urban planners, policy makers and healthcare professionals will not only be building more physically active communities for the future, they will be working on retrofitting existing communities in ways that will increase the health and mobility of their residents.

1. Brian E. Saelens et. al, Environmental Correlates of Walking and Cycling, Findings from the Transportation, Urban Design, and Planning Literature, University of Cincinnati School of Medicine and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Volume 25, Number 2, pp. 80-91, (2000).

3. Lawrence D. Frank et al, Obesity Relationships with Community Design, Physical Activity and Time Spent in Cars, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Volume 27, No. 2, pp. 87-95 (2004).