Do urban green areas really favor the practice of physical activity?

It is obvious that it is easier and more comfortable to go for a walk or run outside the house if there is a walkable green area nearby. But does this availability really influence the chances that we will do more physical exercise than we would if we lived in a neighborhood without green areas? A study has examined the question.

To carry out the study, the team led by Oriol Marquet, a researcher at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA) dependent on the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), used portable sensors and satellite data to relate the activity levels of people with the possibility of walking and the ecology of the places where they carried out their physical activity.

“Specifically, a GPS unit (which recorded a location every 15 seconds) and an accelerometer (which recorded the movement and intensity of physical exercise) were placed on 354 working adult women in four cities in the United States for a week” , explains Oriol Marquet, ICTA-UAB researcher and lead author of the study. This allowed them to calculate their individual exposure to “walkability” and green environments during their participation and to test the relationship between the intensity of these exposures and the levels of physical activity recorded by the accelerometer.

“Participants who spent more time in very ‘walkable’ and green places had the highest levels of moderate and vigorous physical activity. This could indicate that the previously established effects of ‘walkability’ levels on physical activity could be even higher when vegetation is added to these environments”, indicates Marquet.

These findings are important because they validate existing hypotheses using novel methods and approaches. “Very few previous studies have used wearable devices—accelerometers, GPS—to capture participants’ exposures and physical activity by taking into account all of their daily movements and changes in location,” he clarifies. Likewise, the use of non-linear models has allowed them to observe the existence of thresholds and minimum levels of exposure to “walkability” and the presence of vegetation.

The results of the new study corroborate that urban areas with more “walkable” and green environments favor the practice of physical activity among citizens. (Photo: Amazings/NCYT)

These data suggest that there is no dichotomy between green spaces and “walkable” spaces, but rather that those spaces that most contribute to physical activity and the use of active modes of transport are, in fact, those that combine “walkability” with a high presence of vegetation. This finding is one more argument for urban planners, landscape architects and policy makers to consider the need to design greener and “walkable” urban environments as a tool to create more sustainable and healthy mobility models.

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The study is titled “GPS-based activity space exposure to greenness and walkability is associated with increased accelerometer-based physical activity”. And it has been published in the academic journal Environment International. (Source: UAB. CC BY-NC 4.0)