Topics applied into action

We explored the influence of third places on walking habits across life stages. Our study demonstrates the unique goal structures for students, workers, and retirees, identifying key patterns shaping walking behavior in cities. Integrating these findings into urban planning can revolutionize cityscapes and promote healthier, more active communities.

Air pollution kills. But who is most exposed to air pollution in a city? This paper explores how different workers in Bangkok are exposed to PM2.5, how they protect themselves (or not), and what this means for city planners.

Our findings revealed that despite the limited play destinations compared to the local child population, children’s outdoor play experiences are predominantly positive. This positive outlook is attributed to their sense of safety within familiar spaces and strong social ties with neighbours beyond their immediate families. Key contributing factors include the proximity of schools and play areas to residential locations, the strategic placement of playgrounds along home-to-school routes, and the hierarchical relationship among neighbourhood open spaces.

The System for Observing Outdoor Play Environments in Neighborhood Schools (SOOPEN) is a new systematic observation tool to assess children´s play behavior. SOOPEN uses a novel group dynamics approach. The tool has good reliability and is accompanied by a user-friendly protocol.

High-density urban environments significantly affect children's play and well-being. This study provides current insights and explores potential solutions for enhancing play spaces in compact cities, aiming to promote a healthier and more sustainable urban future for children. Our goal was to synthesize current knowledge and provide guidance for improving play spaces in compact cities, ultimately contributing to more sustainable and liveable urban environments for children.

Children’s physical activity and movement increases when they visit nearby parks often and stay longer. However, simply building more parks is not enough. We show how practical design, safety and inclusive programming can turn everyday parks into places where children want to play. Most importantly, measure success by visits and time spent, and not by counting parks and playgrounds!

In this study, I measured the size of outdoor playgrounds at all daycare centers in Oslo and looked at how these sizes relate to how densely populated the districts are and how many children are enrolled at each center. Since the 1980s, Oslo has been getting busier and more built-up due to a compact city policy, a trend that is likely to continue as more people move to the city in the coming years. This makes it interesting to investigate how living in a denser city and having bigger daycare centers might affect the space children have to play outside in their daycare.

We recognised that while playspaces are crucial for child development and community building, their quality in Melbourne’s greenfield developments is highly inconsistent. Playspaces often suffer from minimal design guidance, maintenance pressures, risk aversion, and a lack of genuine community engagement. As a result, children and families miss out on vibrant, inclusive, and challenging play environments. We saw an urgent need to understand how governance structures influence playspace design and delivery in these rapidly growing communities.

Health is rarely prioritized in urban decision making. Requiring Health Impact Assessment obliges developers to focus on questions of health. Some local authorities require this, but not all. This is the first paper to undertake a comprehensive review of when and where Health Impact Assessment is required in England, and to set out ways to make the process more effective.

Even within relatively wealthy cities, food insecurity and health inequalities can be sharply concentrated in specific neighborhoods. We show how economic inequality, food access, and health outcomes are closely linked across Staten Island — and what this means for city leaders and practitioners.

Anthropogenic climate change is bringing with it a whole host of deleterious public health impacts. People will die and suffer disproportionately following inequitable societal structures. With every passing year time to mitigate and adapt to anthropogenic climate change slips away. The time is now to deliberately plan for the health impacts that are now ‘baked in’ for centuries to come.

The study aims at understanding the qualities of different. Although previous studies have explored the well-being-related benefits of recreational walking in nature, studies examining the perceived qualities and contextual factors of these walks are rare.