As a designer, I like to tackle these problems and examine how we can design the built environment to be more accommodating, safe, and provide equal opportunities.
While many studies have found the built environment to be associated with walking, most have used cross-sectional research designs and few have examined more distal cardiometabolic outcomes.
It is necessary that the design of built environment to be supportive and provide adequate access to essential urban and social resources, e.g. employment, education, medical, social welfare and recreation etc., for all, including individuals with disabilities.
While many studies have found measures of the built environment to be associated with active transportation, most have relied on cross-sectional research designs that are particularly vulnerable to residential self-selection.
Thus, quantitative HIA combined with economic valuation enables the health benefits of increased transportation physical activity from changes in the built environment to be considered alongside traditional transportation metrics.
Thus, in this exploratory work, we found specific, measurable features of the built environment to be consistently associated with increased risk of adverse birth outcomes in unadjusted models and housing damage to be associated with SGA, birth weight, and BWPGA after confounder adjustment.
Given limited prior research, literature assessing possible mechanisms from the built environment to health outcomes is scarce.
Hence, efforts to change the built environment to enhance health supporting behaviours and influence health outcomes may produce inconsistent results for some population groups, unless variations in responses to the built environment are considered.
Given strong interest in adapting local built environments to climate change, it is important to continue developing more refined measures of environmental variables.
Creation of these individualized measures has been conducted in previous research [ 52- 54], and is a useful tool to enable the objectively measured built environment variables to be compared with individual-level health and self-report data.
Whether this energy will seep out into the built environment remains to be seen, but you'll need sunglasses.
