Walking Routes Research Articles

PRACTICE OF WATER USE IN CITIES

The development of many cities has historically been linked to water. Coastal areas are one of the most attractive areas in cities, villages, and settlements: promenades, beaches, and fishing give people rest, the joy of communicating with nature, and energize them. Every year, the recreational load on coastal areas in urban and suburban areas is increasing, land is being cleared for summer cottages in coastal protection strips, and pollution by municipal and industrial runoff is increasing due to a decrease in the level of water treatment. The consequences of these negative processes are the degradation of coastal areas, pollution of water areas, and the death of river ecosystems. The state of the Dnipro ecosystem, like many rivers and their coastal areas, requires effective solutions to improve the natural state, revitalization, and reduce anthropogenic pressure to a minimum, which will trigger self-recovery mechanisms of the river ecological system. 
 The purpose of this publication is to draw attention to the importance of revitalization of water areas and coastal areas in urbanized cities. The article examines the practice of water use in cities. Special attention is paid to the water objects of Kyiv, the state of the Dnipro River in the capital of Ukraine. Conclusions are made regarding the necessity of revitalization of river ecosystems in an urbanized environment.
 Dnipro has always been an important drinking resource for Kyiv. The coast of the Dnieper River along Podil — the Podil embankment — is a place that performed different functions in different periods of development. This has resulted in a strong contrast in land uses, common practices, users, architecture and a wide range of issues and challenges. Determination and prioritization of these challenges depend on the vision of further development of the territory. Today, the Dnipro Embankment is an active public space in Kyiv.
 The regeneration project of the Podil embankment — the area stretching from Postova Square to the Gavani industrial zone along the Dnipro River — was initiated by a team of "Agents of Change" specialists in the spring of 2019 with the vision of "Available, active and clean embankment.
 The process of revitalization of coastal areas, which have degraded due to the burden of industrial enterprises, warehouses, and landfills, is gaining momentum. Successful embankment revitalization projects have common features:
 
 Return of the river to its natural state, restoration of flora and fauna.
 Filling the embankment with new people-oriented functions.
 
 In order to provide citizens with access to water, variability in walking routes and ways of spending leisure time, it is necessary to combine separate spaces into a continuous barrier-free environment and provide it with comfortable access from the city. The territory of the Dnipro embankment needs further profile studies to successfully overcome the challenges. The most important of them should be the study of the Dnipro ecosystem, because the issue of sustainable water purification is the most complex and complex.

Obtaining geographical competences through online cartography of familiar and unfamiliar urban heritage: lessons from student workshops

ABSTRACT In times of the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers on all levels have had to adapt to an online or hybrid teaching environment. People in geography, a discipline that traditionally values field trips to connect theory to practice, have had to find online alternatives for educational activities that normally would have taken place in the field. This has led to several innovative practices, which, however, have only to a limited degree been purposively tested for efficacy because of the ad-hoc, enforced nature of the required changes. This project deals with this issue by studying, through student workshops dealing with the creation of online didactic walking routes in two cities, how students can obtain specific geographical competences such as interpreting different historical layers that collectively shape the current urban fabric through online cartography. We found that students reported clear improvements in geographical reasoning skills, regarding both GIS and heritage interpretation. There were no clear patterns regarding the role of familiarity with the studied city for the quality of the produced story maps. On final reflection, we argue that online cartographic exercises are a valuable addition to the geographers’ educational toolkit to bounce forward to a more resilient, reflective educational practice after the pandemic.

Associations between local area deprivation and physical activity in cognitively impaired people: an accelerometry study

AbstractBackgroundEmpowering people with cognitive impairment (PwCI) to maintain physical activity (PA) supports functional independence. PwCI participate in less PA than recommended; disease‐specific factors (e.g. cognitive changes) do not sufficiently explain this. In older adults, most habitual PA takes place in the home or local neighbourhoods. Targeting PA in both the home and local community may be more impactful than creating external opportunities (e.g. exercise classes).Regular participation in PA requires time, money, security, and access. Area deprivation may contribute to inequalities in PA participation through environmental factors; less deprived areas may have safer walkable routes and more immediate socialisation opportunities which support PA. Understanding the complex relationship between local area deprivation and PA may support personalised care for PwCI. We aimed to explore associations between local area deprivation in the North East of England and PA in PwCI and cognitively‐intact older adults (controls).MethodWe recruited 82 PwCI (mild cognitive impairment, dementia) and 26 controls. Daily step count was measured using an accelerometer worn on the lower back continuously for seven days. We derived mean daily step counts for each individual day. Individuals’ neighbourhoods were linked to UK government area deprivation statistics. Hierarchical Bayesian models assessed the association between area deprivation and daily step count in PwD and healthy older adults.ResultPreliminary results indicated that greater area deprivation is associated with lower daily steps for cognitively‐healthy older adults (12,308 (8,302‐19,111) steps/day for controls in least deprived areas, vs 9,349 (5,178‐17,444) steps/day in most deprived areas), but not for PwCI (9,018 (7,042‐11,565) steps/day for PwCI in least deprived areas vs 9,124 (6,553‐12,435) steps/day in most deprived areas), who had consistently low step counts across neighbourhoods (Figure 1).ConclusionCognitive impairment may impose a barrier to maintenance of habitual PA which supersedes the positive or negative influences of area deprivation on PA in cognitively healthy older adults. Findings are limited by lack of regional diversity and statistical power; further research should examine area deprivation across the whole of the UK to ensure accurate representation of area deprivation. PA interventions should consider multiple socio‐ecological factors, including personal, organisational, environmental and policy‐related components.

Associations between local area deprivation and physical activity in cognitively impaired people: an accelerometry study.

Empowering people with cognitive impairment (PwCI) to maintain physical activity (PA) supports functional independence. PwCI participate in less PA than recommended; disease-specific factors (e.g. cognitive changes) do not sufficiently explain this. In older adults, most habitual PA takes place in the home or local neighbourhoods. Targeting PA in both the home and local community may be more impactful than creating external opportunities (e.g. exercise classes). Regular participation in PA requires time, money, security, and access. Area deprivation may contribute to inequalities in PA participation through environmental factors; less deprived areas may have safer walkable routes and more immediate socialisation opportunities which support PA. Understanding the complex relationship between local area deprivation and PA may support personalised care for PwCI. We aimed to explore associations between local area deprivation in the North East of England and PA in PwCI and cognitively-intact older adults (controls). We recruited 82 PwCI (mild cognitive impairment, dementia) and 26 controls. Daily step count was measured using an accelerometer worn on the lower back continuously for seven days. We derived mean daily step counts for each individual day. Individuals' neighbourhoods were linked to UK government area deprivation statistics. Hierarchical Bayesian models assessed the association between area deprivation and daily step count in PwD and healthy older adults. Preliminary results indicated that greater area deprivation is associated with lower daily steps for cognitively-healthy older adults (12,308 (8,302-19,111) steps/day for controls in least deprived areas, vs 9,349 (5,178-17,444) steps/day in most deprived areas), but not for PwCI (9,018 (7,042-11,565) steps/day for PwCI in least deprived areas vs 9,124 (6,553-12,435) steps/day in most deprived areas), who had consistently low step counts across neighbourhoods (Figure 1). Cognitive impairment may impose a barrier to maintenance of habitual PA which supersedes the positive or negative influences of area deprivation on PA in cognitively healthy older adults. Findings are limited by lack of regional diversity and statistical power; further research should examine area deprivation across the whole of the UK to ensure accurate representation of area deprivation. PA interventions should consider multiple socio-ecological factors, including personal, organisational, environmental and policy-related components.

Invariant Cubature Kalman Filtering-Based Visual-Inertial Odometry for Robot Pose Estimation

To maintain mechanistic stability while tracking the designated walking route, a robot must be cognizant of employed posture. Generally, visual-inertial odometer (VIO) is utilized for robot state estimation; however, the traditional cubature Kalman filter VIO (CKF-VIO) cannot transfer rotational uncertainty and compensate for the system’s processing error. To effectively improve the accuracy and stability of robot rigid body pose estimation, this paper proposes a matrix Lie group representation-based CKF framework which characterizes the uncertainty prompting in robotic motion while eliminating the VIO system internalization errors. The robot state, consisting of inertial measurement unit (IMU) pose, velocity, and 3-D landmarks’ positions, is deemed to be a single element of a high-dimensional Lie group SE2+p <xref ref-type="disp-formula" rid="deqn3" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">(3)</xref> , while the accelerometers’ and gyrometers’ biases are appended to the state and estimated as well. The algorithm is validated by simulations with Monte Carlo and experiment. Results show that the CKF-VIO with a high-dimensional Lie group can improve the accuracy and consistency of robot pose estimation.

Accurate assessment of walking energy expenditure in the main seafront walking route of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria to promote health-related tourism

Accurate assessment of walking energy expenditure in the main seafront walking route of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria to promote health-related tourism

Demands and Tendencies of Isparta City People for the Nature Walking Route

Demands and Tendencies of Isparta City People for the Nature Walking Route

Analyzing Person-Place Interactions During Walking Episodes: Innovative Ambulatory Assessment Approach of Walking-Triggered e-Diaries.

Walking behavior is positively associated with physiological and mental health as much evidence has already shown. Walking is also becoming a critical issue for health promotion in urban environments as it is the most often used form of active mobility and helps to replace carbon dioxide emissions from motorized forms of transport. It therefore contributes to mitigate the negative effects of climate change and heat islands within cities. However, to promote walking among urban dwellers and to utilize its health-enhancing potential, we need to know more about the way in which physical and social environments shape individual experiences during walking episodes. Such person-place interactions could not adequately be analyzed in former studies owing to methodological constraints. This study introduces walking-triggered e-diaries as an innovative ambulatory assessment approach for time-varying associations, and investigates its accuracy with 2 different validation strategies. The walking trigger consists of a combination of movement acceleration via an accelerometer and mobile positioning of the cellphone via GPS and transmission towers to track walking activities. The trigger starts an e-diary whenever a movement acceleration exceeds a predetermined threshold and participants' locations are identified as nonstationary outside a predefined place of residence. Every 420 (±300) seconds, repeated e-diaries were prompted as long as the trigger conditions were met. Data were assessed on 10 consecutive days. First, to investigate accuracy, we reconstructed walking routes and calculated a percentage score for all triggered prompts in relation to all walking routes where a prompt could have been triggered. Then, to provide data about its specificity, we used momentary self-reports and objectively assessed movement behavior to describe activity levels before the trigger prompted an e-diary. Data of 67 participants could be analyzed and the walking trigger led to 3283 e-diary prompts, from which 2258 (68.8%) were answered. Regarding accuracy, the walking trigger prompted an e-diary on 732 of 842 (86.9%) reconstructed walking routes. Further, in 838 of 1206 (69.5%) triggered e-diaries, participants self-reported that they were currently walking outdoors. Steps and acceleration movement was higher during these self-reported walking episodes than when participants denied walking outdoors (steps: 106 vs 32; acceleration>0.2 g in 58.4% vs 19% of these situations). Accuracy analysis revealed that walking-triggered e-diaries are suitable to collect different data of individuals' current experiences in situations in which a person walks outdoors. Combined with environmental data, such an approach increases knowledge about person-place interactions and provides the possibility to gain knowledge about user preferences for health-enhancing urban environments. From a methodological viewpoint, however, specificity analysis showed how changes in trigger conditions (eg, increasing the threshold for movement acceleration) lead to changes in accuracy.

Can colored sidewalk nudge city tourists to walk? An experimental study of the effect of nudges

Physical inactivity has been an increasing sub-health condition. Nudging people to participate in physical activities consequently becomes a public health priority. This study aims to showcase how color as a design factor can work to nudge city travelers to take on walking. Alongside the color effect, this experimental study incorporates another two design factors, namely, priming and social norms. The findings suggest that the use of colored sidewalks stimulate perceptual salience and individuals' moods, thereby increasing travelers' desire for walking. Priming tourists with sneakers and displaying social norms were also found to increase travelers’ interest in walking. The current study is innovative in incorporating color in the design of walkable routes in cities for its visitors. It is the first to apply nudges into the context of walkable city design oriented towards tourists.

Analysis of spatial form and structure of commercial pedestrian blocks based on Isovist and big data

Commercial pedestrian blocks play an indispensable role in urban life. With the development of urban commercial intensification, the construction of commercial pedestrian blocks has ushered in a period of rapid development. To explore the spatial form and structural features of commercial pedestrian blocks, we examined the Qingniwa-Tianjin Street commercial pedestrian block in Dalian, China. We developed a new quantitative research method, using Isovist-App software simulation, big data statistics and Arc GIS analysis methods to explore the spatial morphological structure characteristics of commercial districts. The results show that Tianjin Street’s pedestrian axis has low spatial permeability and monotonous browsing routes. This suggests that the outdoor pedestrian space design does not attract crowds to wander around and stroll. The overall centrality of the space was relatively high, and the spatial accessibility was good. The walking route provided a wide field of vision, stimulating people’s desire for exploration. The space is highly guided, and people can visit according to the designed route. There is a big difference in the spatial aggregation and dispersion of POI facilities. Transportation, sports, and leisure facilities are the most evenly distributed, while shopping and life service street facilities vary considerably. During holidays, the intensity and duration of crowd activities are the largest, followed by working days and weekends. The people in the block mainly gather in the western and southern commercial complexes, and the attractiveness of outdoor pedestrian streets is lower than that of commercial complexes. Node space B has pedestrian streets with varying spatial interfaces and inconsistent visual appeal. The results can be used to support the spatial form and structural renewal design of commercial pedestrian blocks. The methods presented in this study provide a quantitative approach for the spatial analysis of other functional areas in the city.

Assessment of walkability and walkable routes of a 15-min city for heat adaptation: Development of a dynamic attenuation model of heat stress.

Actively addressing urban heat challenges is an urgent task for numerous cities. Existing studies have primarily developed heat mitigation strategies and analyzed their cooling performance, while the adaptation strategies are far from comprehensive to protect citizens from heat-related illnesses and deaths. To address this research gap, this paper aims to enhance people's adaptation capacity by investigating walkability within fifteen-minute cities (FMC). Taking cognizance of thermal comfort, health, and safety, this paper developed a dynamic attenuation model (DAM) of heat stress, along with heat stress aggravation, continuance, and alleviation. An indicator of remaining tolerant heat discomfort (R t ) was proposed with the integration of the Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI) to assess heat-related walkability. Following an empirical study among 128 residents in Mianyang, China, and assessing four levels of heat stress, the maximum tolerant heat discomfort was determined to be 60 min. Furthermore, the DAM was applied to an FMC with 12 neighborhoods in Fucheng, Mianyang, China. The results indicate that for each neighborhood, the street was generally walkable with an R t ranging between 15 and 30 min, after walking for 900 m. A population-based FMC walkability was further determined, finding that the core area of the FMC was favorable for walking with an R t of 45-46 min, and the perpetual areas were also walkable with an R t of 15-30 min. Based on these results, suggestions on the frequency of public services (frequently used, often used, and occasionally used) planning were presented. Overall, this paper provides a theoretical model for analyzing walkability and outlines meaningful implications for planning heat adaptation in resilient, safe, comfortable, and livable FMCs.

Dynamic pedestrian traffic assignment with link transmission model for bidirectional sidewalk networks

Planning assessment of urban walking infrastructure requires appropriate modeling methodologies that capture the time-dependent and unique microscopic characteristics of bidirectional pedestrian streams. In this paper, we develop a simulation-based dynamic pedestrian traffic assignment (DPTA) model specifically formulated for walking networks (e.g. sidewalks) with bidirectional links. The model consists of a dynamic user equilibrium (DUE) based walking route choice and a link transmission model (LTM) for network loading. The formulated DUE adopts a pedestrian volume delay function (pVDF) taking into account the properties of bidirectional pedestrian streams such as self-organization. The adopted LTM uses a three-dimensional triangular bidirectional fundamental diagram as well as a generalized first-order node model. The applicability and validity of the model is demonstrated in hypothetical small networks as well as a real-world large-scale network of sidewalks in Sydney. The model successfully replicates formation and propagation of shockwaves in walking corridors and networks due to bidirectional effects.

Study on the countermeasures to urban heat of street space focusing on walking routes

Study on the countermeasures to urban heat of street space focusing on walking routes

Cloud Computing Based on Big Data-Driven Robot Walking Route and Real-Time Positioning Intelligent Determination

With the continuous development of technologies such as sensors, computers, and artificial intelligence, intelligent mobile robots with thinking, perception, and dynamics functions are widely used in military, political, and scientific research. Its development has had a significant impact on national defense, society, economy, science, and technology and has become a strategic research goal in the high-tech field of various countries. Robot positioning technology is one of the key research technologies for portable robots, and reliable posture is the key prerequisite for completing various tasks. This article aims to study the robot walking route driven by big data and the intelligent determination of real-time positioning based on cloud computing. This paper proposes an active general positioning algorithm based on real-time positioning function, which can improve the convergence speed and robustness of general positioning when different map scenes do not have clear geometric features and contain map noise. The most basic requirement for robots to perform autonomous operations is to have reliable positioning performance. The experimental results in this paper show that dynamic global positioning and adaptive behavior tracking are effective. Compared with the traditional algorithm, the improved algorithm increases the convergence speed of the global layout by 41.59%.

The importance of ecological quality of public green and blue spaces for subjective well-being

Background and aim There is now considerable evidence that the natural environment provides health and well-being benefits in urban environments. However, little is understood about the role of ecological quality in maximising well-being gains. Methods We examine the relationship between the accessibility of public natural spaces of high ecological quality and two measures of subjective well-being for adults, using the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), a large, longitudinal panel dataset. We then compare this relationship with that found with all Public Open Spaces, regardless of their ecological quality. We use the designation of Sites of Importance for Nature Conservation (SINC) as an objective indication of high-quality green- or bluespace, and life satisfaction and mental distress as measures of well-being. We use the Areas of Deficiency dataset from Greenspace Information for Greater London CIC (GiGL) to identify residential areas with more than a 1 km walk from a SINC, based on actual walking routes from known access points. Results Postcode-level analysis using regression modelling reveals that living beyond a 1 km walk of a SINC decreases an individual’s life satisfaction by 0.117 points on a scale of 1 to 7. No relationship is found for mental distress. We also do not find any significant relationship between either well-being measure and all Public Open Spaces. Conclusions These findings suggest that the ecological quality of publicly accessible open spaces is important for the well-being of residents in Greater London and highlights the need for improving the provision of, and access to, high-quality green- and bluespaces in urban areas. Keywords Biodiversity; Greenspace; Bluespace; Well-being; BHPS

A Device Designed to Improve Care and Wayfinding Assistance for Elders with Dementia

With an aging population and the rapid increase in the rate of dementia, the care of patients is a significant problem for caregivers and family members at home. Patients’ spatial and environmental cognitive impairments require caregivers to pay attention to their walking routes, walking safety, and avoiding dangerous areas. With this in mind, this study developed the Dementia Care Management and Mentoring Guarantee System (DECMGSS) to examine the accuracy and efficiency of patient wayfinding, and to reduce the stress on institutional caregivers through a wayfinding task and a caregiver stress scale (CSS). The results showed that the mean time spent with the DECMGSS on 10 subjects with mild to moderate dementia was significantly less than that without the device (t = −2.930, p = 0.017), and the number of errors was also less but not significantly different. In addition, the DECMGSS did significantly reduce the caregiver stress load. Twenty institutional caregivers were divided into experimental and control groups. There was no significant difference in the stress load scores of the control group before and after the test. However, a significant mean difference was found between the pre-test and post-test scores of the experimental group (t = 3.315, p &lt; 0.009). DECMGSS’s intervention significantly reduced the caregiver’s personal anxiety and stress in caregiving and the patient’s time dependence on the caregiver. Although this product is primarily used for patients in the Care Center, it can also be used in other home care settings.

The Moving City: Scenes from the Delhi Metro and the Social Life of Infrastructure by Rashmi Sadana

Reviewed by: The Moving City: Scenes from the Delhi Metro and the Social Life of Infrastructure by Rashmi Sadana Amrita Ibrahim Sadana, Rashmi. The Moving City: Scenes from the Delhi Metro and the Social Life of Infrastructure. University of California Press, 2021. 274 pp. Working from home during the pandemic, one of the things I missed most about pre-pandemic life was commuting on the metro. Only I didn't realize this until I went back to work in person a year and five months later. Though I live in Washington D.C. and not Delhi, the metro fundamentally mediated my relationship to work and the city. It allowed me a space of my own between work and home, where I could be both public and private, from where I could watch people or retreat into my own space by means of a book or headphones, even as I shared it with others. Somewhat unexpectedly, it was this network of buses, trains, and walking routes—a quintessentially urban infrastructure—that I most joyfully embraced when I returned to working in person. The significance of the metro was emphasized by the contact it afforded with other people, even when distanced and masked; the feeling of intersecting with others as we all went about our lives and work. Rashmi Sadana's new book, The Moving City: Scenes from the Delhi Metro and the Social Life of Infrastructure, captures this sense of stranger-sociality by means of a "street-level ethnographic view of the city" (2). Sadana undertakes an unconventional, and yet entirely appropriate, approach to study the relatively new, glitzy Metro in Delhi that has taken over discussions of public transportation in the past decade and a half. Interspersed with secondary research and interviews with engineers, policy makers, and politicians are vignettes—what Sadana also calls secular parables or urban chronicles—of her encounters with people taking the metro, getting on [End Page 901] and off, and navigating different stations along its many lines. "Each vignette" Sadana writes, "represents a world of its own, which connects to the Metro in some way and intersects with the city. Each vignette is a kind of magnification" (22). Through these vignettes and the interfaces or seams where the Metro meets the street, where the old meets the new, Sadana offers the reader an impressionistic experience of the city. She joins together riders, last-mile suppliers like shared taxis, auto, cycle, and e-rickshaws, engineers and planners, political leaders, and citizens separated by class, caste, and local context. The book is divided into three sections: Crowded, Expanding, and Visible, which Sadana describes as the "three principles" at work in the infrastructure, the city, and everyday life. The three-way split also mirrors the three phases of construction of the Metro; the first talks about the newness of the Metro as infrastructure and experience; the second how the Metro expanded both as an infrastructure as well as a set of possibilities for riders and the city; and third, what social mobilities, hierarchies, and experiences are made visible, even as others are obscured through the design and new normative civics that the Metro enables. The structure and tone of the book mimic, Sadana tells us, the Metro as infrastructure, as experience: "One cannot dwell anywhere for too long…The Metro is an emergent whole… that has redefined the urban landscape; yet…the Metro also signifies the fragment, the partial journey, the unexpected meeting" (22). The book takes the Metro not only as an object of study, but also as the means of ethnography. The ethnographer rides the metro, "clocking over four thousand hours in all" (7), exploring all the lines and stations along the way. Under her treatment, the Metro emerges as text, infrastructure, a space, a form of neo-liberal pedagogy, an imagination, a method, a site of ethnography, a site of movement and flow, a gendered, classed, public, shared, aloof, and yet intimate world. Each of the vignettes allows the reader to see how the Metro could be read, experienced, or imagined in these ways without having to first wade through substantial background literature that might weigh down or fix the nature of the "Metro" as...

TYPOLOGY FEATURES OF GREENWAYS IN THE STRUCTURE OF THE "GREEN" PEDESTRIAN NETWORK OF CITIES

The article highlights the concept of greenways and features of the formation of their types in the structure of the "green" pedestrian network of cities.&#x0D; Based on the fact that the "green" pedestrian network (GPN) is a multifunctional component of the modern architectural environment and urban greening system, which is a locally defined linear open greenways along: green natural corridors (eco-corridors), including green urban spaces (forests, parks, gardens, squares, boulevards, recreational spaces); street and road network, including pedestrian zones (streets, squares, public spaces, embankments); historical trade routes and railways, the issue of forming types of greenways for different types of pedestrian and non-motorized traffic in the city is relevant.&#x0D; The problem of comfortable and safe movement by foot and by individual non-motorized vehicles (INTV) in cities has become aggravated. The ability to ride a bike or walk through the city becomes more and more difficult. Many large Ukrainian cities are dominated by wide streets and narrow sidewalks, along which large flows of people move and by underdeveloped pedestrian links. Increasingly, urban residents are dissatisfied with the lack of comfortable continuous walking routes and open spaces.&#x0D; The purpose of the publication is to develop typological features of greenways in the structure of the "green" pedestrian network. This will improve the conditions for walking, cycling, and INTV-assisted travel and their wider use in cities.

P02-04 Citizen science during Covid-19 pandemic to enhance an activating environment in a low-SES neighborhood

One neighborhood in Groningen, the Netherlands, is a neighborhood housing about 12,000 citizens with on average a low-SES background, showing a less healthy and active lifestyle. In the past, initiatives have been undertaken to promote active lifestyle by implementing outdoor facilities stimulating physical activity. However, use of facilities was poor due to lack of citizen involvement. Aim of this project was to engage citizens in the overall process of capturing, plan making and prototyping of concepts for an exercise-friendly physical and social environment.From January 2020 - May 2022 a Living Lab was run following the ‘Our Voice’ citizen science method. Participatory citizen science was applied in which a community of stakeholders (public/private parties) and citizens was built. The community addressed the problem by creating more insight in promoting/degrading features in the neighborhood concerning an active lifestyle. Citizens (n = 40) used the Stanford Neighborhood Discovery Tool, which allowed for systematic observations of the physical environment. Additionally, emergent research walks gave extra information on neighborhood barriers/facilitators next to Discovery Tool data. Collected data allowed citizens to brainstorm on possible solutions in sessions facilitated by the researchers. Solutions were presented to local government and further developed for implementation and realization.Use of the Discovery Tool created an overview of the neighborhood. Based on positive/negative features, new ideas were generated for improving exercise-friendliness. One example was a walking route along art objects in the neighborhood. Furthermore, a citizens work group was formed which discussed this route, and other ideas and prototypes, with local government. This group was also involved in realization of prototypes.Our project resulted in a citizen science approach which can be transferred to other neighborhoods. Use of Discovery Tool showed many benefits for neighborhood plan making. Early and continuous involvement of citizens will lead to more sustainable engagement and is a powerful method to create engagement around societal problems and social innovation in the field of Health Enhancing Physical Activity.A transferable method for neighborhood development based on citizen science was developed. Key feature in our method was integration of design thinking, citizen engagement, and use of digital tools.

The Perspective Projects Promoting Sustainable Mobility by Active Travel to School on the Example of the Southern Poland Region

The paper presents a discussion concerning the development of projects regarding active travel with the policy of sustainable mobility, with active school transport in southern Poland being taken into special consideration. The implementation of the idea of sustainable school travel planning involves linking several social groups, including traffic planners and organizers, school administrators, governments, parents, and children. This, in turn, requires considering the criteria reported by all parties when choosing a scenario for the region’s development in terms of transport solutions. The following study was based on the methodological foundations of multicriteria decision-making analysis. The research purpose of this paper is to identify and classify the actions, policies, and scenarios of active travel projects for the sustainable development of mobility based on the cities of southern Poland. The evaluation was carried out through expert methods with multicriteria decision-making tools based on the MULTIPOL (MULTI-criteria and POLicy) prospective analysis technique. It allowed for the selection of the most probable policy, which covered the six actions considered by the experts to be the most significant for the development of the active school transport system in the analyzed region. Such actions are as follows: identification of walking school bus routes, modernization of crosswalk lines, planning of walking and cycling routes to schools, promoting safety educational programs, distribution of active school transport booklets and cycling, and pedestrian skills training workshops. The paper presents a new method to evaluate the policies and actions regarding promoting sustainable (active) travel to school. The innovative approach results from assembling a mixed group of people (stakeholders) as experts. The mix of experts consisting of users (pupils and parents), practitioners, and scientist experts in this field allowed us to score policies, actions, and scenarios, enabling a wider spectrum of assessment than before.