Community Design and Physical Activity: What Do We Know? - and what DON'T we know?

Introduction Motivated by different concerns, urban planners and public health officials have joined together in the last several years to advocate for community design that promotes walking, biking, and other forms of physical activity. The Active Living by Design Program, for example, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, aims to increase physical activity through community design by “providing leadership in promoting environments that offer choices for Active Living, a lifestyle that easily integrates physical activity into daily routines” (1). Although these efforts do not explicitly focus on families, their emphasis on neighborhood design raises an interesting and important question: how can community design effectively be used as a strategy for increasing physical activity for both children and their parents? In this presentation, I review what we know – and what we don’t know – about the link between community design and physical activity for both adults and children and offer initial recommendations as well as questions for further research on what forms of community design most effectively increase physical activity for families.