Why do people walk?

This was a systematic review of reviews examining:

  • how the notion of « walkability » is understood
  • and the state of research associating built environment and walking as a behaviour

The review identified some consensus, a lack of an agreed theoretical framework, but also promising developments linking built environment and walking as a behaviour. In the light of the model (further named Social Model of Walkability), important research gaps were identified, namely relative to inconsistent measures of objective and perceived environments, pairwise testing oversimplifying complex interactions, and a lack of evidence relative to disabled people. The full paper is available here.

This work was part of my thesis, available here (supervision: Professor Erica Hinckson, Associate Professor Melody Smith, Dr Tom Stewart).

This post is also available in: Anglais