Getting physical with the neighbourhood

The building boom did nothing for our activity levels, so we need to get out there and redesign our environment, writes SYLVIA THOMPSON

MORE TEENAGE girls drive to school than cycle in Ireland. This shocking statistic was cited at a seminar in Dublin last week on finding ways to improve the built environment to encourage physical activity.

“We need to rethink what we’ve done to become modern and sophisticated because the environment we’ve built and the policies we have put in place have made us inactive,” said Prof James Sallis, director of the Active Living Research and professor of psychology at San Diego State University, California, who addressed the seminar.

Sallis is to the forefront of tackling inactivity in schools and communities across the United States. Sports, Play and Active Recreation for Kids (Sparks) is one programme he developed to tackle the poor quality of physical education (PE) in schools.

“We found that often children were queuing up to use one ball while the teacher supervised the activity. So we trained the teachers to teach active enjoyable PE where everyone was moving [including the teacher] and learning skills,” he explained.

“We got PE specialists to implement PE optimally, which meant no choosing teams, no using PE as a punishment and setting PE homework for the children, so they could set goals for weekends and the summer holidays,” he added.

The Sparks programme is now used in thousands of schools across the United States.

Sallis then turned his attention to creating opportunities for exercise for everyone in everyday life. “We discovered that people who lived in neighbourhoods with high ‘walkability’ were 12 per cent less obese than those who didn’t. New York City, for example, is the least obese place in the United States because it is a walkable city,” he said.

A new international programme, the Active Living Research project, was created with the goal of reversing the childhood obesity epidemic by 2010.

“Our aim is to use research to inform policy by going to schools, city councils, policy makers and I urge you all to become health advocates in your communities,” Sallis told the 100-plus delegates at the seminar, organised by the Institute of Public Health in Ireland and the Northern Ireland Centre of Excellence in Public Health.

Teresa Lavin, public health development officer at the Institute of Public Health, acknowledged that making changes to the built environment in Ireland was a key to improving levels of physical activity. She cited the safe routes to school segment in the Green Schools programme and home zones – in which surfaces on roads are changed to indicate it’s a shared space – as positives.

Both speakers acknowledged that the urban sprawl created by the building boom in Ireland over the past 10 years had been detrimental to physical activity.

“There aren’t many solutions to these large residential areas except creating commercial hubs with shops and apartments on the arterial roads, and giving people shortcuts to walk there with pleasant things to look at on the way there,” said Sallis.

“We want to make healthy choices easier, safer and more enjoyable for everyone, and if we make changes to the built environment, we can do that,” added Sallis.

NEIGHBOURHOOD QUALITY OF LIFE STUDY: WHAT DOES IT SAY?

This study found that in neighbourhoods which had high “walkability”, people were more active for five to seven minutes a day, which added up to 35-49 minutes a week.

The study also found that obesity levels were 12 per cent lower in these areas. A 5 per cent increase in walking had other knock-on effects: a 32 per cent increase in walking as the means of transport, a 6.5 per cent decrease in vehicle miles in the area and a 5.6 per cent decrease in pollution levels.

See drjamessallis.sdsu.edu