Abstract
Can the shape of a city promote physical activity? The question of why individuals engage in physical activity has been widely researched, but that research has predominantly focused on socio-demographic characteristics (e.g., age, gender, economic status) and coarse-grained spatial characteristics (e.g., population density), overlooking key urban characteristics of, say, whether a city is navigable or, as urban theorist Kevin Lynch put it, whether it is ‘imageable’ (whether its spatial configuration is economic of mental effort). That is mainly because, at scale, it is neither easy to model imageability nor feasible to measure physical activity. We modeled urban imageability with a single scalable metric of entropy, and then measured physical activity from 233K wearable devices over three years, and did so across 19 major cities in the developed world. We found that, after controlling for greenery, wealth, walkability, presence of landmarks, and weather conditions, the legibility hypothesis still holds: the more imageable a city, the more its dwellers engage in physical activity. Interestingly, wealth (GDP per capita) has a positive association with physical activity only in cities with inclement climate, effectively acting as a compensation mechanism for bad weather.
Highlights
The number of individuals who engage in physical activity is far from being satisfactory [1], emphasizing the urgent need of investigating and promoting it [2].Traditionally, engagement in physical activity is mainly down to two types of characteristics of an individual [3, 4]
Even after controlling for these characteristics, physical activity is higher in cities that are more “imageable” (Sect. 5), suggesting that people who reside in cities with higher recognizable areas are more likely to engage in physical activity than those who live in cities with low recognizable areas
4 Analysis To test the legibility hypothesis [9] and, whether the street entropy is a good predictor of physical activity, we developed four main linear regression models (Table 3), which controlled for traditional proxies for physical activity
Summary
The number of individuals who engage in physical activity is far from being satisfactory [1], emphasizing the urgent need of investigating and promoting it [2]. While previous work has focused on studying the impact of a wide variety of socio-demographic conditions [7, 8] and spatial characteristics [1, 4], it is unclear whether the way dwellers psychologically perceive the entire city has any association with physical activity. In the urban theory literature, such a perception is often called urban legibility or imageability This is defined by Kevin Lynch in his seminal work “The Image of the City” [9] as the property of the built environment that helps city dwellers to form recognizable mental images of the environment, and to navigate it with ease. Even after controlling for these characteristics, physical activity is higher in cities that are more “imageable” (Sect. 5), suggesting that people who reside in cities with higher recognizable areas are more likely to engage in physical activity than those who live in cities with low recognizable areas
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