Health and Community Design: The Impact Of The Built Environment On Physical Activity

By Lawrence Frank, Peter Engelke and Thomas Schmid

Health and Community Design is a comprehensive examination of how the built environment encourages or discourages physical activity, drawing together insights from a range of research on the relationships between urban form and public health. It provides important information about the factors that influence decisions about physical activity and modes of travel, and about how land use patterns can be changed to help overcome barriers to physical activity. Chapters examine:

• the historical relationship between health and urban form in the United States
• why urban and suburban development should be designed to promote moderate types of physical activity
• the divergent needs and requirements of different groups of people and the role of those needs in setting policy
• how different settings make it easier or more difficult to incorporate walking and bicycling into everyday activities A concluding chapter reviews the arguments presented and sketches a research agenda for the future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Jul 11, 2012
• ISBN: 9781597268615

Book preview

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ABOUT ISLAND PRESS

Island Press is the only nonprofit organization in the United States whose principal purpose is the publication of books on environmental issues and natural resource management. We provide solutions-oriented information to professionals, public officials, business and community leaders, and concerned citizens who are shaping responses to environmental problems.

In 2003, Island Press celebrates its nineteenth anniversary as the leading provider of timely and practical books that take a multidisciplinary approach to critical environmental concerns. Our growing list of titles reflects our commitment to bringing the best of an expanding body of literature to the environmental community throughout North America and the world.

Support for Island Press is provided by The Nathan Cummings Foundation, Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Educational Foundation of America, The Charles Engelhard Foundation, The Ford Foundation, The George Gund Foundation, The Vira I. Heinz Endowment, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Henry Luce Foundation, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Moriah Fund, The Curtis and Edith Munson Foundation, National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, The New-Land Foundation, Oak Foundation, The Overbrook Foundation, The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, The Pew Charitable Trusts, The Rockefeller Foundation, The Winslow Foundation, and other generous donors.

The opinions expressed in this book are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of these foundations.

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Copyright © 2003 Lawrence D. Frank and Peter O. Engelke

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, 1718 Connecticut Ave., NW, Suite 300, Washington, DC 20009

Island Press is a trademark of The Center for Resource Economics.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Frank, Lawrence.

Health and community design : the impact of the built environment on physical activity / Lawrence Frank, Peter Engelke, Thomas Schmid.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

9781597268615

1. Urban health. 2. Transportation—Health aspects. 3. City planning—Health aspects. 4. Health behavior. I. Engelke, Peter. II. Schmid, Thomas. III. Title.

RA566.7.F736 2003 362.1’042—dc21

2003000999

British Cataloguing-in-Publication Data available

The contents of this book reflect the views of the authors, who are responsible for the facts and accuracy of the findings presented herein. The contents do not necessarily reflect the official views or policies of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of British Columbia.

No copyright claim is made in the work of Thomas L. Schmid, employee of the federal government.

Printed on recycled, acid-free paper e9781597268615_i0002.jpg

Manufactured in the United States of America

09 08 07 06 05 04 03 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Table of Contents

ABOUT ISLAND PRESS

Title Page

Copyright Page

Table of Figures

List of Tables

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CHAPTER ONE - Introduction

CHAPTER TWO - Public Health and Urban Form in America

CHAPTER THREE - Physical Activity and Public Health

CHAPTER FOUR - Physical Activity

CHAPTER FIVE - Physical Activity

CHAPTER SIX - Understanding the Built Environment

CHAPTER SEVEN - Transportation Systems

CHAPTER EIGHT - Land Use Patterns

CHAPTER NINE - Urban Design Characteristics

CHAPTER TEN - Application of Principles

CHAPTER ELEVEN - Conclusion

APPENDIX - Summary of Selected Traffic Calming Studies

ENDNOTES

GLOSSARY

REFERENCES

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

INDEX

ISLAND PRESS BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Table of Figures

FIGURE 1-1

FIGURE 2-1

FIGURE 2-2

FIGURE 2-3

FIGURE 2-4

FIGURE 3-1

FIGURE 3-2

FIGURE 3-3

FIGURE 3-4

FIGURE 4-1

FIGURE 4-2

FIGURE 4-3

FIGURE 4-4

FIGURE 5-1

FIGURE 5-2

FIGURE 6-1

FIGURE 7-1

FIGURE 7-2

FIGURE 7-3

FIGURE 7-4

FIGURE 7-5

FIGURE 8-1

FIGURE 9-1

FIGURE 9-2

FIGURE 9-3

FIGURE 10-1

FIGURE 10-2

FIGURE 10-3

FIGURE 10-4

FIGURE 11-1

List of Tables

TABLE 3-1

TABLE 4-1

TABLE 4-2

TABLE 4-3

TABLE 5-1

TABLE 5-2

TABLE 5-3

TABLE 5-4

TABLE 5-5

TABLE 5-6

TABLE 6-1

TABLE 7-1

TABLE 9-1

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The idea for a book on the relationships between community design and public health arose out of the authors’ research on the relationships between the built environment, travel choice, and air quality in Seattle, Washington and Atlanta, Georgia. The extension of this research into physical activity and public health was spawned by a grant provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to Lawrence Frank and Peter Engelke at Georgia Tech in 1998, the purpose of which was to review the literature on public health on the one hand and transportation, urban design, and city planning on the other. In so doing, it was hoped that this research would help to clarify the commonalities between these seemingly disparate fields and assist in the development of a comprehensive research agenda. This grant led the CDC to participate in a larger research program called SMARTRAQ (Strategies for Metropolitan Atlanta’s Regional Transportation and Air Quality), which is a $4.6 million regional study focused on transportation, land use, air quality, and public health. The incorporation of a health-based research agenda into SMARTRAQ is a unique feature of this regional transportation and land use study and reflects the understanding possessed by the program’s funding agencies of the health effects of growth and development in the Atlanta region. The authors are, therefore, extremely appreciative of the support provided by the study’s primary sponsoring agencies, the Georgia Department of Transportation and the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority. To this end, we would like to thank the principals within these agencies who have been instrumental in putting together a health-oriented research program for the Atlanta region, in particular George Boulineau and Charles Fleming. Additionally, the authors would like to thank the Turner Foundation for providing the grants that allowed us to spend time conducting background research on related topics and to write this manuscript. Particular thanks in this context go to Douglas Stewart.

The CDC has a long-standing interest in policy and environmental approaches to the prevention and control of disease and associated conditions. Our interest in the relationships between community design and health-enhancing behaviors such as physical activity came to a clear focus as a result of an event sponsored by the CDC in 1998 in Atlanta, Georgia, which included a panel discussion on policy and environmental actions to promote physical activity. This panel included non-traditional public health partners as well as representatives from the fields of transportation, community design, criminology, environmental protection, and architecture. The research agenda that emerged as a result of this meeting has guided the efforts of the CDC’s Division of Nutrition and Physical Activity, Active Community Environments (ACEs) workgroup. This book is one of the first tangible products of these efforts. It and the ACEs research portfolio could not have been developed without the intellectual, administrative, and financial support of William Dietz and David Buchner. This is also true of Michael Pratt, who along with Richard Killingsworth and Thomas Schmid are founding members of the ACEs workgroup.

An undertaking such as this would not have been possible were it not for the hard work and valuable contributions of numerous individuals. The staff at Island Press worked diligently to move this book from rough draft to finished product. Particular thanks need to be given to our editor at Island Press, Heather Boyer. Heather’s insight and suggestions greatly improved the style and content of our manuscript, while her patience with the inevitable delays involved in producing the finished manuscript was much appreciated.

We would like to recognize the contributions made by Christopher Leerssen of the SMARTRAQ program at Georgia Tech. His work made the images contained in this book possible. This is not an insignificant task—as the reader will see, this book contains a large number of graphics. Each had to be created from scratch, adapted from another source, or simply improved in terms of content or style. The high quality of the images is the direct result of Christopher’s considerable abilities.

We are also appreciative of the insights and observations of many people who influenced the ideas and research that form the basis for this book. These individuals provided intellectual assistance during the course of numerous conversations and, thus, influenced our musings on the subjects contained in this book in one way or another. These individuals include Howard Frumkin, Gayle Nelson, James Sallis, Brian Saelens, Chris Leinberger, Gregg Logan, Richard Jackson, Jim Chapman, Jim Durrett, Anne Vernez-Moudon, Walter Brown, Jonathan Levine, Jack Feldman, and John Pucher. Particular thanks go to Jonathan Levine, whose review of the manuscript yielded many valuable suggestions.

During the course of our background research, we have relied on numerous sources, including academic journal articles, books, reports issued by government agencies and nonprofit organizations, and excerpts from the speeches and journals of historical figures. As are all scholars, we are deeply indebted to the organizations that published these materials and to the individuals who created them. We are solely responsible for any errors, omissions, misinterpretations, or misrepresentations of their work.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

We ought to plan the ideal of our city with an eye to four considerations. The first, as being the most indispensable, is health.

ARISTOTLE,

Politics (ca. 350 B.C.)

Community design influences human behavior. The ways that cities, suburbs, and towns are designed and built impact the people who work, live, and play in them. The placement, layout, and design of transportation systems, of office complexes, of parks, and of the countless physical elements that make up communities result in real places that have real significance in terms of how we spend our time and what activities we engage in. Where people live, where they work, how they get around, how much pollution they produce, what kinds of environmental hazards they face, and what kinds of amenities they enjoy are a direct product of how communities are designed. This book is about how our communities influence one important type of behavior, physical activity, and the health outcomes that are associated with it.

Unfortunately, the great majority of Americans do not get enough physical activity to maintain their health over the long run. Physical inactivity is an enormous health problem in this country, contributing to, among other things, premature death, chronic disease, osteoporosis, poor mental health, and obesity. The environments in which most people spend their time—the modern American city and the suburbs and exurbs that have been the dominant form of development in this country for over a half century—are an important contributor to this problem. The cities and suburbs that we inhabit are not now, and have not been for a long time, places that encourage some critically important forms of physical activity. In short, our physical environment inhibits many forms of activity, such as walking, and has become a significant barrier to more active lifestyles.

A century ago, American cities were highly walkable places. They were compact. Commercial, retail, and even industrial operations existed in close proximity to housing, allowing people to walk to work or school or the store. Out of necessity, buildings and streets were designed to the human scale. Streetcar and trolley systems provided a major form of transportation for millions of passengers every day, in every major city in the nation, which meant that people had the means to make longer journeys without the use of a car. When combined, all of this produced environments in which someone could satisfy their basic daily needs within a comfortable walking distance of their home or within a distance reachable through a combination of walking and trolley riding.

Unfortunately, the burgeoning cities of the industrial era also brought with them a host of serious problems. They were dirty and polluted. They were crowded. Most importantly, they produced health problems for their inhabitants. The worst of these were the communicable disease epidemics—typhus, yellow fever, and all manner of other infectious diseases—that swept through them with frightening regularity. The very conditions that made the industrial city a highly walkable place, including its concentration of people, its mixing of uses, and its high density of buildings, came to be blamed—not quite accurately, as research eventually showed—for creating the conditions in which epidemics could occur. So during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, critics tore away at the intellectual foundation of the compact industrial city. They sought to replace it with a new paradigm, a new way of thinking about how to build cities. In the old city’s place they created the modern decentralized city, where housing was separated from workplaces and buildings placed far apart from one another, separated by expanses of grass and trees. America’s new cities of big lawns and big distances would, they hoped and expected, produce more healthy living. What resulted was the city that we are so familiar with today—dominated by suburbs, spread out, with different uses separated one from another and almost everything reliant on automobile travel. This mass suburbaniz ation also led directly to a decline, in terms of population, wealth, and public investment in the older, established central parts of most cities, resulting in the widespread abandonment of the fabric of the old walkable city.

Widespread criticism of this development model has appeared only during the last couple of decades. Much of it is a reaction to the omnipresent automobile congestion that is the hallmark of the decentralized city. Some of it is centered on the monstrous-yet-monotonous ugliness of the endless strip malls and parking lots that have proliferated from one end of the country to the other. Many people are concerned about the environmental consequences of the modern city. These concerns focus on the enormous amount of land consumed, the air quality problems produced by all of the cars needed to keep these cities running, the vast quantities of municipal water that is required to irrigate the lawns of the new suburban landscapes, or the rainwater that is wasted as polluted runoff from parking lots and streets. An even more recent source of criticism is from the field of public health, which is beginning to explore potentially uncomfortable linkages between the decentralized city and different indicators of health.

Physical Activity, Past and Present

In the old cities, getting enough physical activity during one’s day wasn’t an issue because it was as much a part of life as eating or sleeping. Today, physical activity has been engineered out of most aspects of life. Work is no longer physically demanding for most people and daily living patterns, from mowing the grass to cooking dinner to washing clothes, require significantly less manual effort than they once did. The modern city has changed all of this, creating environments in which it is less and less common to work physical activity into the everyday patterns of life. The dominant forms of community design have contributed to this decline by making walking and cycling for transportation difficult if not impossible. Many of the reasons why are clear to even the casual observer. Long distances between places mean that most people cannot walk or bicycle from one place to another. The streets and roads that connect these far-flung places are designed for cars, often making them unsafe and extremely unattractive for pedestrians and bicyclists. To make matters worse, most developers and retailers have long given up on the profitability of designing places that are visually attractive to people who might want to walk from place to place, favoring instead designs that attract motorists. As a result, being physically active now requires planning for activities such as running, biking, aerobics, or weight lifting that can be done during leisure time.

Coincidentally, during the post–World War II period, public health research came to focus more and more on recreational and vigorous physical activity as the way to improve public health. For years, health experts recommended that each individual get at least twenty minutes of high-intensity exercise each day. The basic idea was that anything less would result in little or no improvement in long-term health. And, judging by the attention paid to such forms of exercise in the popular media, it would seem that vigorous physical activity has been a runaway success. Specialty magazines devoted to participatory sports and exercise programs ranging from running to weight lifting to climbing jam the racks at newsstands. An array of televised sports occupies much of the country’s attention on weekends, bringing basketball, football, hockey, baseball, and a slew of other offerings into millions of homes. Advertisers in the print and electronic media perpetually barrage the country with images of the perfectly fit human figure, both male and female.

Yet this picture of a fit and healthy society is enormously misleading. The fact is that most Americans don’t get enough physical activity to meet the health recommendations set by public health agencies. Despite the omnipresence of televised sports, the billions of dollars in exercise equipment and apparel sold every year, the millions of words published on fitness and exercise regimens, and the endless rhetoric springing from athletic shoe and apparel companies’ advertising campaigns, only about five percent of the population—one person in twenty—gets enough physical activity through vigorous exercise to satisfy public health standards (CDC 2001b). Even worse, some studies have found that as much as 40 percent of the population is sedentary (being completely inactive) (Schoenborn and Barnes 2002); they report that they get no physical activity at all during their leisure hours. For all of the promotion and attention paid to sports- and gym-based exercise as the way to get people physically fit, the great majority of the population has not succeeded in becoming physically active through these means. While millions of people do get a great deal of health benefit as well as personal satisfaction from sports, from training for endurance and strength events, and from going to the gym for a workout, many more find that they don’t have the will or the ability or the time or the resources to do any of these things.

These are some of the reasons why, beginning in the 1980s and continuing into the 1990s, public health agencies and researchers began to take a serious look at more moderate types of physical activity such as walking and bicycling. Mounting evidence from epidemiological studies began to reveal that moderate forms of physical activity could provide both short- and long-term health benefits, contributing to a reduction in the risk of premature mortality, chronic disease, and a host of other maladies. Moreover, public health researchers began to believe that a focus on more moderate forms of physical activity might enable a broader cross-section of the population to become physically active. Because moderate physical activity is lower in intensity, it is easier for a person who is sedentary to begin and to maintain their participation over the long term. Moderate physical activity can be purposive, meaning that it can be integrated into daily living habits, and as a result it should be more attractive to people who don’t have the necessary free time to work out at a gym or go mountain biking in the woods.

What is old, then, is new: public health agencies now endorse those forms of moderate physical activity such as walking and bicycling that used to be very commonplace in American cities and towns. Public health officials recommend that people accumulate at least thirty minutes of moderate activity on most, preferably all days of the week. Adding any additional amount of moderate activity is good; in fact, while public health agencies recommend trying to get at least thirty minutes per day, there is a belief that even ten or twenty additional minutes per day might generate some benefits. Vigorous physical activity is still considered to be an important means of staying healthy, but public health experts now believe that adding a half hour or more of moderate physical activity per day on most days of the week is enough to generate long-term health benefits.

This consensus opinion carries enormous significance for addressing the problem of physical inactivity. It suggests—perhaps demands—that public health agencies not limit themselves to programs that rely solely on motivating individuals to take up vigorous exercise. Rather, the door has been opened for an examination of the environmental influences of moderate physical activity. If one needs a half hour or more of moderate physical activity per day, accumulated in numerous short bouts, it might be wise to focus on creating environments that allow these types of activities to occur as a matter of course, as incidental to doing other things. For many people, perhaps even the majority of the population, such an approach may be the only realistic way to increase physical activity (incidentally, increasing physical activity in this way may also be a way to reduce automobile use and lessen its attendant problems, such as air pollution and congestion). For different segments of the population who are disadvantaged—many elderly and physically handicapped people, for instance—vigorous activities may be out of the question completely. For physically capable people in the prime of life, other obstacles such as a lack of time may severely constrict their ability to work out on a regular basis. For the significant percentage of the population that is sedentary, the benefits of adding a half hour of moderate physical activity each day is enormous: physical activity follows a dose-response curve, wherein the marginal benefits to increased exercise accrue the most to those who are the least active to begin with (see chapter 3).

Community Design, Physical Activity, and Health: A Conceptual Model

Figure 1-1 provides a simple model of the relationships between physical activity, health, and the environments in which people live and work. This is the basic conceptual model for the chapters to follow. Causality flows, roughly, from the built environment (the communities in which we live and environments in which we work) through physical activity patterns to public health outcomes. Physical activity is at the literal as well as conceptual center of the model, providing the linkage between the real, built environment and the health outcomes that are of such concern to public health officials.

The built environment denotes the form and character of communities. It is made up of the countless specific places—homes, streets, offices, parking lots, shopping malls, restaurants, parks, movie theaters—that constitute a city or town or suburb. Our model utilizes three broad categories—transportation systems, land use patterns, and urban design characteristics—to provide coherence to the built environment. Transportation systems connect places to each other, determining how feasible it is to use different types of transportation, including walking and bicycling, to get from one place to another. Local transportation systems are impacted by major investments in highways, airports, and other infrastructure decisions made by regional and state officials. Land use patterns consist of the arrangement of residences, offices, restaurants, grocery stores, and other places within the built environment. The arrangement of these activities, or land uses, determine how close different places such as housing, work, and entertainment are to one another, thereby making journeys on foot or by bicycle practical or impractical. They also shape physical activity patterns through the distribution of open space and recreational facilities where sports and other activities can take place. Finally, urban design characteristics influence how people perceive the built environment. Design plays a large role in determining whether an environment is perceived as hostile or friendly, attractive or ugly, and vibrant or dull. Urban design denotes small-scale features of the built environment that impact how people feel about being in specific places.

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FIGURE 1-1. Model of linkages between the built environment, physical activity, and public health

The conceptual model provided in figure 1-1 illustrates the interactive nature between one’s health and the environment in which one lives, works, and engages in other activities. The arrows that run in both directions between physical activity and health denote how physical activity is both a cause and an effect. The arrow extending from public health to physical activity reflects the likelihood that some health outcomes, such as high levels of obesity or chronic disease in the population, may make it harder for some people to engage in physical activity. Basically, the poorer the health