Polish Version of the Neighbourhood Environment Walkability Scale (NEWS-Poland)

Abstract

The characteristics of built environments are the subject of intense consideration in the search for solutions to promote wellbeing and a higher quality of life among the inhabitants of cities. Walkability, defined as the extent to which the built environment is friendly to living and fulfilling the needs of the area, has become an important concept in sustainable urban design, public health and environmental psychology. This study systematically adapted the Neighbourhood Environment Walkability Scale (NEWS) for Poland, and evaluated the construct validity aspects of the adapted version among Polish adults. A total sample of 783 participants from a TriCity (Trójmiasto) agglomeration completed the adapted version of the NEWS. Smaller extracted samples of the participants also completed wellbeing related scales, including self-efficacy, local identity and distance to city centre measures. It was expected that various districts of Gdańsk would differ in terms of walkability. The confirmatory factor analysis showed satisfactory goodness-of-fit statistics and factor loadings corresponding to the proposed original factor structure. According to the predictions, the NEWS subscales correlated with the self-efficacy, local identity and wellbeing related measures. In addition, the comparisons between the neighbourhoods of Gdańsk also showed a predictable pattern of results. Overall, the NEWS demonstrated satisfactory measurement properties, and may be useful in the evaluation of the built environment in Poland.

Investigating urban form, and walkability measures in the new developments. The case study of Garnizon in Gdansk

“…Therefore, the performance of the urban form, in particular, the adopted layout can be perceived as good, with the potential to support pedestrian traffic within the perimeter of the complex. These conclusions relate to the findings of the study by Jaśkiewicz and Besta on walkability in Gdansk (Jaśkiewicz and Besta, 2016), where the relatively compact, in this case, historical districts, based on block layout were rated as walkable by survey participants.…”

“…The most recent research that contributed to our study comes from M. Jaśkiewicz and T. Besta (Jaśkiewicz and Besta, 2016). Within the location of Gdansk, they performed the validation of the Neighbourhood Environment Walkability Scale (NEWS) for Poland and evaluated the construct validity aspects of the adapted version.…”

Walkability research: concept, methods and a critical review of post-socialist studies

“…Lastly, post-socialist authors have published methodological as well as theoretical papers concerning walkability issues. While the first of them pertains to the development and validity evaluations of NEWS modifications Besta 2016 andCerin et al 2019), the second category is devoted to the critical insights in implementing sustainable mobility plans and strategies in particular cities from the urban planning point of view. The advantage of spatial planning papers can be seen in the describing of the initiatives in implementing various practices types and pointing to the problems of political will.…”

“…Social dimension benefits pertain to the overall quality of life improvement (Blečić et al 2015, Jaśkiewicz and Besta 2016, Tong et al 2016and Zhao and Chung 2017. In particular, such improvements pertain to the mental and physical health of inhabitants, increase in the frequency and quality of social interactions, increase in safety, reduction in traffic accidents as well as in social justice, which can be seen in the availability of walking paths for all of the socio-economical classes (Southworth 2005, Ariffin and Zahari 2013, Ng et al 2015and Rafiemanzelat et al 2017).…”

Study on the Regeneration of City Centre Spatial Structure Pedestrianisation Based on Space Syntax: Case Study on 21 City Centres in the UK

“…Such evaluation tools have been developed in several countries, including the Walk Score and Walkability Score in the USA and the Walkability App in Europe, etc. International perspectives on walkability include social factors [43], facilities [44], physical activity [45], social justice [46], aging-friendliness [47][48][49] and neighbourhood [50]. The tools for evaluating walkability include space syntax [51,52], GIS [53], deep learning [54], environmental sensors [54], virtual reality [55], hierarchical clustering technique [56], mobile methodologies [57] and BIM [58].…”