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The role of the built environment in improving public health through fostering physical activity has come under increased scrutiny in recent years. This study investigates relationships between walking activity and the configuration of green spaces in Greater London. Pedestrian activity for N = 54,910 walking trip stages is gathered through the London Travel Demand Survey (LTDS), with routes between origin and destination mapped onto the street network from the Integrated Transport Network of Ordnance Survey. Green spaces were extracted from UKMap and agglomerated to form London's hundreds of parks. Regressions of pedestrian activity on park configuration, controlling for built environment metrics, revealed that catchments around smaller parks have more walking trips. Irregularity of park shape has the opposite effect. Park density, measured as number of parks inside a catchment, is insignificant in regression. Parks adjacent to retail areas were associated with pronounced increases in walking. The study contributes to landscape, urban management, environmental policy and urban planning and design literature. The evidence provides implications for performance-oriented policy and design decisions that configure a city's green spaces to improve citizens' public health through enhancing walkability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Physical activity is essential for health; walking is the easiest way to incorporate activity into everyday life. Previous studies report positive associations between neighbourhood walkability and walking but most focused on cities in North America and Australasia. Urban form with respect to street connectivity, residential density and land use mix-common components of walkability indices-differs in European cities. The objective of this study was to develop a walkability index for London and test the index using walking data from the Whitehall II Study.Methods: A neighbourhood walkability index for London was constructed, comprising factors associated with walking behaviours: residential dwelling density, street connectivity and land use mix. Three models were produced that differed in the land uses included. Neighbourhoods were operationalised at three levels of administrative geography: (i) 21,140 output areas, (ii) 633 wards and (iii) 33 local authorities. A neighbourhood walkability score was assigned to each London-dwelling Whitehall II Study participant (2003-04, N = 3020, mean ± SD age = 61.0 years ± 6.0) based on residential postcode. The effect of changing the model specification and the units of enumeration on spatial variation in walkability was examined.Results: There was a radial decay in walkability from the centre to the periphery of London. There was high inter-model correlation in walkability scores for any given neighbourhood operationalisation (0.92-0.98), and moderate-high correlation between neighbourhood operationalisations for any given model (0.39-0.70). After adjustment for individual level factors and area deprivation, individuals in the most walkable neighbourhoods operationalised as wards were more likely to walk >6 h/week (OR = 1.4; 95 % CI: 1.1-1.9) than those in the least walkable.Conclusions: Walkability was associated with walking time in adults. This walkability index could help urban planners identify and design neighbourhoods in London with characteristics more supportive of walking, thereby promoting public health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the potential modifying effect of age and mediation effect of co-morbidity on the association between land use mix, a measure of neighbourhood walkability, and five-year mortality among the 2424 individuals participating in the year-10 follow-up of the Cognitive Function and Ageing Study in England. Postcodes of participants were mapped onto Lower-layer Super Output Areas, a small area level geographical unit in the UK, and linked to Generalised Land Use data. Cox regression models were fitted to investigate the association. For the younger older age group (75-79 years), the effect of high land use mix on an elevated risk of mortality was mediated by co-morbidity. For older old age groups (80-84, 85+ years), a higher land use mix was directly associated with a 10% lower risk of five-year mortality. The findings suggest differential impacts of land use mix on the health of the younger and older old. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reinvention of liveability in public places and its integration with social, environmental, cultural, and economic factors of living can be analyzed in detail in urban studies. This is studied in particular here through evaluation of different factors of quality of life and well-being in urban environments, one of which is the convention for encouraging social experience based on the socioeconomic and socioenvironmental values of the public place. This study will also discuss the relation between quality social environments and the socioeconomic values of public places, and how by enhancing the liveability of a place we can increase public expenditure and sociality of a place. Through interaction mapping analysis, and based on both human geography and urban studies, the study evaluates the implications of spatial change (i.e., temporary uses of a place) and walkability on maximizing the potential of a place and its immediate context. This comparison study then elaborates on socioeconomic benefits of walkability for liveability of public places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims and Background: Recovery capital refers to the resources people can call upon to initiate and sustain alcohol and drug problem resolution. Measuring this phenomenon could help an individual better understand their strengths as well as gauge the impact of any interventions designed to improve recovery capital and / or reduce addiction severity. This study aimed to test the internal consistency, stability reliability, criterion-related concurrent validity and content validity of the Recovery Capital Questionnaire (RCQ).Setting and Participants: Participants (n = 173) accessing community based addiction treatment (n = 108) and residential treatment (n = 65) in England and Scotland completed the RCQ at two time-points one week apart (n = 102) to test stability reliability, and also completed the RCQ alongside measures of quality of life and resilience (n = 152). Content validity was assessed by seven subject matter experts with content validity ratio and index calculated.Findings: Cronbach's Alpha values (internal consistency) included: social α = 0.52 (0.40-62); physical α = 0.73 (0.66-0.78); human α = 0.85 (0.82-0.88); community α = 0.85 (0.82-0.88); RCQ Total α = 0.88 (0.85-90). RCQ stability reliability (r = 0.89) and ICC (0.88) were calculated. Content Validity Index statistic of 0.91 was calculated. Correlations between relevant domains within the RCQ and WHOQOL Bref were found to include: r = 0.44, 0.59, 0.66 and 0.40. Correlations between RCQ and CD-RISC scores were calculated (r = 0.65).Conclusion: The Recovery Capital Questionnaire was found to possess good overall internal consistency and stability reliability. Content validity was found to be strong and the RCQ demonstrated good concurrent validity with a measure of quality of life and a measure of resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Individual-level data of health outcomes and their contributing factors are rarely available at a neighbourhood level, hindering local efforts to address complex issues such as dietary behaviours and their associated inequalities. Spatial microsimulation can be used to approximate individual-level data for small areas (eg, lower or middle super output areas), creating novel synthetic data to support local decision making. We aimed to estimate small-area fruit and vegetable intake to explore geographical inequalities of diet in England. In this spatial microsimulation, cross-sectional study, we performed the spatial microsimulation using individual-level data from the 2014–19 UK National Dietary and Nutritional Survey (NDNS) and aggregated data from the 2011 UK Census. Iterative proportional fitting was done in R (version 1.4.1106) to estimate daily servings of fruits and vegetables for each lower super output area (n=32 844) in England. Internal validation techniques such as measures of total absolute error were evaluated and external validation including comparison to variables of interest (eg, correlation with obesity) undertaken. 3633 adults aged 16 years or older (2092 women and 1541 men) were included in the analysis. We estimated that 26% of adults in England meet the daily recommendations of fruit and vegetable intake, with 7% consuming fewer than one serving per day. This result mirrored NDNS findings as expected. Fruit and vegetable consumption was unevenly distributed within and across regions in England (16–46% meeting the five-a-day recommendations). There were higher rates of fruit and vegetable consumption than those among populations in the least deprived neighbourhoods with 32% meeting daily recommendations versus 20% in the most deprived. Preliminary model validation suggests estimates were robust for internal validation. External validations were mixed. Wide geographical inequalities in fruit and vegetable consumption exist across England, varying greatly by level of deprivation. This study presents a novel framework for small area estimation of diet indicators and could support better nuanced local decision-making. Economic and Social Research Council, North West Social Science Doctoral Training Partnership (reference 2107539). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]