Can Neighborhood Design Encourage Physical Activity?

Although new urbanism continues to gain popularity worldwide, many of its effects remain unexamined. If neighborhood design can support or impede active lifestyles, we hypothesize that residents of new urbanist neighborhoods will exhibit higher levels of physical activity than residents of conventional communities. Following a quasi-experimental research design, this study evaluates physical activity patterns of residents in two distinctly designed neighborhoods, a new urbanist and a conventional suburban neighborhood in a central North Carolina community. The two neighborhoods were matched in terms of regional accessibility, freeway access, assessed property values, and age of development. All heads of household in both neighborhoods were asked to complete a mailed survey and all residents were asked to complete a travel diary. We found no statistically significant differences in various measures of physical activity between household heads of the two neighborhoods, even after adjusting for individual and household characteristics. However, we uncovered differences in where people were physically active. New urbanist residents were more likely to be physically active in their neighborhood than conventional suburban residents, suggesting a substitutive behavior between the places where physical activity can occur. Furthermore, more walking for utilitarian purposes in the new urbanist neighborhood, but not for leisure, was the source of this difference in physical activity location. This indicates that new urbanist neighborhood residents were able to incorporate physical activity into their daily routine of accessing destinations in their neighborhood. While underscoring the complexity of understanding the determinants of physical activity, our results suggest that living in a new urbanist neighborhood was not related to increased levels of physical activity.