It seems wholly intuitive that cities that feature more green spaces and are generally more walkable will also be cities where citizens are more active. That has been proven nonetheless by research from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, which shows that physical activity grows considerably when neighborhoods are both walkable and green.

The findings emerged after volunteers were equipped with wearable sensors, with this data then combined with satellite data to enable the researchers to connect their activity levels with the nature of the environment, both in terms of its greenness and walkability.

“Specifically, a GPS unit (which recorded their location every 15 seconds) and an accelerometer (which recorded movement and the total number of steps taken) were attached to 354 working adult women for one week, in four sites across the United States,” the authors explain.

Walkable cities

Walkability, which was defined as areas where there is a high density of destinations that allow people to walk to everywhere they need to be, is an increasingly desirable characteristic of cities that are striving to reduce their carbon footprint and improve the air quality citizens are exposed to.

The researchers calculated the individual exposure of citizens to both greenness and walkability, before linking this exposure with their levels of physical activity during the study period.

“Participants who spent more time in highly walkable and green locations had the highest levels of moderate and vigorous physical activity. This might indicate that the previously established effects of ‘walkability’ levels over physical activity might be even stronger when vegetation is added to these environments,” they explain.

Usable data

The findings are interesting, not least because they use wearable data to capture the real-time activity of people to understand their daily movements and changes in location.

The use of nonlinear models also allowed them to monitor the thresholds and minimum levels of exposure to environmental factors, and how this influenced people’s mobility.

Collectively, the researchers believe that this data shows that there is no dichotomy between walkable spaces and green spaces. Instead, these spaces contribute to a significant increase in physical activity, and especially in active modes of transport. As such, they urge planners and policymakers to try and combine green spaces with high levels of walkability wherever they can.