Healthy neighbourhoods, healthy future.
A new systematic review identifies features of the built environment that promote physical activity among children and adolescents.
The neighbourhoods in which children and their families live their daily lives are important settings for health-promoting actions and policy. A rapidly urbanising world creates challenges, and there is a need to maintain, upgrade and develop urban areas to promote public health.
The review published in the latest issue of JBI Evidence Synthesis, ‘Promoting activity participation and well-being among children and adolescents: a systematic review of neighbourhood built-environment determinants’, explores the characteristics of the neighbourhood built environment and their potential to support activity participation and strengthen physical and mental well-being in childhood and adolescents.
Lead author of the systematic review, Dr Emma Charlott A. Nordbø, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Public Health Sciences, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, explains:
“The systematic review represents an attempt to identify central factors in planning and creating health-promoting neighbourhoods for children and adolescents. It deals with evidence concerning the influence of different built environment characteristics, such as roads and streets, buildings, green space, facilities and pedestrian infrastructure, on the children’s and adolescents’ well-being and their opportunities to participate in leisure activities."
By identifying central factors in planning and creating health-promoting neighbourhoods, the systematic review contributes to a better understanding of the health-promoting potential of neighbourhood built environments, and promotes evidence-based planning and policy:
“Considering that health and well-being are primarily built and maintained in a wide array of arenas outside the health sector, this systematic review is important because it addresses the neighbourhood as a crucial setting for health-promoting efforts. It pays attention to the built and structural characteristics that contribute to shape our activity patterns to understand how we can create living environments that support health and well-being in early years of life”, says Dr Nordbø. “Research identifying environmental resources for health and well-being is essential if we aim for evidence-based planning of healthy neighbourhoods”, she continues.
The majority of the 127 included studies were cross-sectional, and active travel (i.e. walking or cycling, for example, as a mode of transport) and unspecified physical activity were the most commonly reported outcomes.
The findings suggest that low traffic, infrastructure for walking and cycling, and greater walkability are promising regarding promoting active travel between different destinations in the neighbourhood among children and adolescents.
“Our findings bring a better understanding and support of the role that certain built environment characteristics play in promoting active travel to and from daily destinations among children and adolescents. These factors include low traffic exposure and high safety, pedestrian infrastructure for walking and cycling, shorter distances to facilities and high walkability”, states Dr Nordbø.
A novel finding in this review was that facilities, green space, traffic safety, and pedestrian infrastructure for walking/cycling were most consistently related to unspecified physical activity and, to some extent, leisure-time physical activity. The majority of the studies supporting this beneficial link were of good quality.
“Our findings demonstrate the necessity of putting health and well-being on the agenda of policy makers across public sectors and making them aware of how different decisions influence the young ones in the population. The findings could steer planning and policy efforts in an increasingly urbanised world”, Dr Nordbø says.
Future studies and evidence syntheses need to reinforce the findings of this systematic review: “There are several remaining knowledge gaps that need research before more robust conclusions can be drawn. A high priority is to examine the mechanisms that link built environment to health and well-being", explains Dr Nordbø. “Planning for public health cannot wait. As such, we need to use the best available evidence at this very moment.”
Reference:
Nordbø, Emma Charlott Andersson; Nordh, Helena; Raanaas, Ruth Kjærsti; Aamodt, Geir
JBI Evidence Synthesis: March 2020 - Volume 18 - Issue 3 - p 370-458
doi: 10.11124/JBISRIR-D-19-00051