Co-benefits of designing communities for active living: an exploration of literature

Abstract

To reverse the global epidemic of physical inactivity that is responsible for more than 5 million deaths per year, many groups recommend creating “activity-friendly environments.” Such environments may have other benefits, beyond facilitating physical activity, but these potential co-benefits have not been well described. The purpose of the present paper is to explore a wide range of literature and conduct an initial summary of evidence on co-benefits of activity-friendly environments. An extensive but non-systematic review of scientific and “gray” literature was conducted. Five physical activity settings were defined: parks/open space/trails, urban design, transportation, schools, and workplaces/buildings. Several evidence-based activity-friendly features were identified for each setting. Six potential outcomes/co-benefits were searched: physical health, mental health, social benefits, safety/injury prevention, environmental sustainability, and economics. A total of 418 higher-quality findings were summarized. The overall summary indicated 22 of 30 setting by outcome combinations showed “strong” evidence of co-benefits. Each setting had strong evidence of at least three co-benefits, with only one occurrence of a net negative effect. All settings showed the potential to contribute to environmental sustainability and economic benefits. Specific environmental features with the strongest evidence of multiple co-benefits were park proximity, mixed land use, trees/greenery, accessibility and street connectivity, building design, and workplace physical activity policies/programs. The exploration revealed substantial evidence that designing community environments that make physical activity attractive and convenient is likely to produce additional important benefits. The extent of the evidence justifies systematic reviews and additional research to fill gaps.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12966-015-0188-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

The Neighbourhood Physical Environment and Active Travel in Older Adults: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

“…In the last decade, the health, transportation and environmental sustainability sectors have become increasingly interested in finding ways to promote AT in older adults via environmental and policy interventions [10,[67][68][69][70]. This interest has been accompanied by an eight-fold increase in the number of articles on neighbourhood physical environmental correlates of older adults' AT since the latest systematic review on this topic was published [19].…”

“…These include a quieter environment due to decreased motor vehicle noise as well as reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution, traffic congestion and transport costs [10]. Modelling has shown replacement of urban trips in private motor vehicles with AT can result in important health and economic benefits and reductions in pollutants [11][12][13].…”

Natural and built environmental exposures on children's active school travel: A Dutch global positioning system-based cross-sectional study

“…Children's travel decisions are highly complex; they are driven by, for example, personal characteristics, distance between home and school, safety issues due to traffic, and strangerdanger (Sirard and Slater, 2008;Schoeppe et al, 2013;Mitra, 2013). In addition, natural and urban environmental determinants are suggested to be influential (Pont et al, 2009;Panter et al, Contents lists available at ScienceDirect journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/healthplace 2010; Wong et al, 2011a;Sallis et al, 2015). Despite the significance of greenness and weather conditions for active transport among adults (Helbich et al, 2014;Fishman et al, 2015;Böcker et al, 2016), little is known about how these natural environmental factors shape children's mobility.…”

Children's school commuting in the Netherlands: Does it matter how urban form is incorporated in mode choice models?

“…Although children's physical activity has been declining significantly for many years (Sallis et al, 2015), physical activity is a crucial means to reduce the risk of adverse health conditions in children (Bauman et al, 2012). In the Netherlands, only 18% of children perform the recommended 60 min of physical activity a day (Hildebrandt et al, 2013).…”