Land Use and Built Environment

Locational data, logged on portable GPS units and matched with accelerometer data, was used to examine associations of the built environment with physical activity and sedentary behaviors of adolescent females. In a sample of 293 adolescent females aged 15 to 18 years old in Minneapolis and San Diego, the built environment around each GPS point and its corresponding sedentary, light, and moderate-to-vigorous intensity physical activity was examined using random intercept multinomial logistic regression models. The odds of higher physical activity intensity (3-level outcome: sedentary...

To assess pedestrians' perceptions of the walkability of the urban environment and pedestrian safety in Cali, Colombia. Standardised intercept interviews were conducted of 400 pedestrians walking in 20 randomly selected urban zones to ascertain frequency of walking, and perceptions of safety, the built environment and security. Four focus group meetings were held with community members and students addressing these issues in an open-ended forum. The study analysed quantitative data collected in street interviews and qualitative information from focus groups addressing respondents' views on...

This study determined the criterion validity and test–retest reliability of a brief park use questionnaire. From five U.S. locations, 232 adults completed a brief survey four times and wore a global positioning system (GPS) monitor for 3 weeks. We assessed validity for park visits during the past week and during a usual week by examining agreement between frequency and duration of park visits reported on the questionnaire to the GPS monitor results. Spearman correlation coefficients (SCC) were used to measure agreement. For past week park visit frequency and duration, the SCC were ....

We review a variety of common measures of urban land use mix in order to understand their differences and to identify their strengths and limitations. We then apply these measures to data from a Monte Carlo simulation to ascertain statistical relationships among them, finding that they can be placed into four groups where measures within each group produce highly consistent results: Percentage and Exposure Index; all varieties of the Atkinson Index; Balance, Entropy, and Herfindahl–Hirschman indices; and the Dissimilarity and Gini indices. We find that when analyzing two dimensions...