Access to green space is the most important factor when it comes to getting youth to exercise in parks, far more effective than the inclusion of playgrounds and sports facilities. That’s according to a new report by a group of landscape architecture professors in Norway, published in the journal Landscape Research, based on their search for the most effective ways to encourage physical activity through park design. The report, entitled Promoting Youth’s Physical Activity through Park Design: Linking Theory and Practice in a Public Health Perspective, reviewed 32 studies of the physical benefits to kids of park use. The researchers found that the nearer one lives to green space, the more of it there is nearby and the easier it is to get to, the more it will get used.
It turns out that when it comes to encouraging physical activity in parks, it’s the simple things that matter. Those findings may seem obvious, but in an era where driving rules and walking is all but impossible in many parts of the country, it’s an important reminder.
There are a growing number of policy initiatives out there encouraging just these sorts of simple design interventions. Efforts like Safe Routes to School, which grew out of research into decreasing fatalities for children walking to school in the 1970s, can also have important public health benefits, such as a reduction in childhood obesity, reduced risk of diabetes, and improved bone and muscle health. As more science comes out linking public health to the design of communities, new initiatives are underway to improve public health through better design.
Making Exercise the Easy Choice
“The biggest public health issue in the city was smoking. After that, the next biggest issue was obesity,” says David Burney, chair of the board of directors of the Center for Active Design, a New York City-based organization promoting design and architecture that encourages physical activity. He’s explaining how, after successfully rolling out smoking bans across the city, public health officials in New York set their sights on public health enemy no. 2: bad design.
“[Epidemiologists] were saying, ‘You planners and architects, you’re part of the problem. You’ve created this lifestyle where we don’t move,’” Burney says. Officials from agencies across the city — including planning, health, transportation, and parks and recreation — collaborated with architects and academics to produce a document called Active Design Guidelines. The report outlines a number of strategies that architects, landscape architects and planners can implement to encourage more physical activity in New Yorkers’ daily lives. Those recommendations are scored based on how much science there is to back them up, from generally accepted best practices to strategies for which there is strong evidence of a link to improved health and activity.
“Obesity is becoming an epidemic across the world,” says Burney. “The epidemiologists look at this as an energy imbalance.” To correct that imbalance, the guidelines look for ways to make being active easier than the alternative. They’re simple moves, like making staircases easy to find and nice to use. “When you’re designing a building, you don’t have to tuck the staircases back in a dark corner,” says Burney. “Limited stair use is remarkably effective in countering obesity.”
The Center defines active design as “an approach to the development of buildings, streets and neighborhoods that uses architecture and urban planning to make daily physical activity and healthy foods more accessible and inviting.” The guidelines contain recommendations for a variety of design scenarios, from architectural details like locating spaces such as kitchens, copy rooms and restrooms to encourage walking, to large-scale urban design questions like where bikeways go.
There are also recommendations for making parks and playgrounds more conducive to physical activity. One suggestion is to incorporate natural terrain into the design of play areas. Also, kids play harder on playgrounds that are color-coded for different activities than those that aren’t. Lighting is another factor that has other benefits beyond personal safety. Extending the hours that people feel safe and comfortable in parks also means extending hours where they’re outside being active.
Another counterintuitive recommendation, the installation of benches, which presumably encourages the sedentary activity of sitting, is actually important to getting people up and moving. “One way to make parks more used by seniors, and actually exercise is an important way to extend the longevity of seniors...is to put in benches,” Burney says.
The overarching strategy is to make exercise the easy, pleasant and safe choice. It means comfortable sidewalks and bike paths with safe crossings, amenities like shade, water, lighting and seats that open up spaces for longer periods, and park facilities that respond to local needs and demographics so that people will actually use them. “The outdoor experience is pretty straightforward,” says Burney.
Rewarding Healthy Landscapes
Another program, the Sustainable Sites Initiative (SITES), a green building rating and certification system, encourages the development of healthier and more environmentally friendly parks and landscapes. The program was launched in 2009 and has since certified 30 built projects. After this initial shakedown, the authors have been working to update the program, and they plan to release an updated version in 2014.
SITES is similar to the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED program (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), but the program is targeted at landscapes rather than structures. To receive certification through the SITES program, a project must achieve a given number of credits and prerequisites. Certified projects will be awarded one to four stars depending on how far they go in the inclusion of sustainable features.
“In general, the SITES program looks at what makes a landscape truly sustainable in terms of performance,” says Danielle Pieranunzi, SITES program director. “But of course there’s the human component — the people [who] visit the site or work on the site. We wanted to make sure a connection was being made,” she says.
That led creators of the program — a partnership between the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, the American Society of Landscape Architects and the United States Botanic Garden — to include several credits directly related to health and people. The program’s 51 credits are spread across nine categories covering a variety of site design and construction-related factors. The credits are the product of expansive collaboration that brought together more than 70 experts and an initial “field-testing” phase involving upwards of 150 pilot projects. “These prerequisites and credits combine current science, technology, best practices and performance goals for the design, construction and maintenance of sustainable sites,” says Pieranunzi.
Two categories, Human Health and Well-Being and Education, are directly related to site users. “The Human Health and Well-Being section is about encouraging a person to use the site or learn from the site,” says Pieranunzi. Credits in that section include “support physical activity,” “support social connection,” “minimize exposure to environmental tobacco smoke” and “provide optimum site accessibility, safety and wayfinding.” New for 2014 is a credit encouraging the inclusion of community gardens and space for on-site food production.
There are other decisions that designers can make to improve human health as well.
“The Human Health and Well-Being section is one area, but the whole rating system is really about creating healthier sites for people and other organisms,” Pieranunzi says. The program also encourages cleaning up toxic brownfield sites, protecting air quality during construction, and minimizing pesticide and fertilizer use during maintenance.
The Perfect Park?
To conclude their studies, the authors of each propose a hypothetical park incorporating their findings. So what does the perfect active park look like? It’s nearby, with a balance of sports facilities and natural areas. There are ample walking and biking paths that are safe and comfortable. Benches and water are available throughout, and there’s shade during the day and lights at night. If it feels familiar, that’s because it is. There are plenty of parks and open spaces that do these things remarkably well — so well, in fact, that we often take these basic details for granted. But when they’re missing, the public health consequences for communities can be dire.
Kevan Williams is pursuing his MLA at the University of Georgia.