Annotated Bibliography of “A review on the effects of physical built environment attributes on enhancing walking and cycling activity levels within residential neighborhoods”

Wang, Y. et al. “A Review on the Effects of Physical Built Environment Attributes on Enhancing Walking and Cycling Activity Levels within Residential Neighborhoods.” Cities 50 (2016): 1–15. ScienceDirect. Web.

The purpose of this paper is to identify which characteristics of the built environment influence the activities of walking and cycling. To support their findings and conclusions, the authors use journals from 1977 to 2015 with impact factors of 1.5 as their sources. The authors begin by analyzing the built environment broadly and dividing it into four types of barriers: Opportunity, access, safety and physical barriers. All four of these barriers restrict people from participating in walking and cycling. In order to increase the probability of walking and cycling, the authors discovered that necessary facilities should be provided, nearby, safe and visually appealing to people.

Furthermore, the authors also address more specific built environment factors like: land use, landscaping, greenery, public space, and building design. They discover that providing larger parks, filtering what can be built (liquor stores), increasing trails, adding greenery, and reducing things that do not promote exercise (e.g elevators) can increase participation in walking and cycling.

I chose this source because it provides alternate views on how the built environment affects health compared to the first annotated bibliography. The authors are straightforward with their data and mention the flaws in the data making it unbiased.