America's Obesity Crisis:Exercise: The Walking Cure

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O.K., but how? The built environment is not easy to unbuild. In the late 1980s an architectural and city-planning movement called new urbanism grew to promote the construction of more densely developed and neighborly towns. It led to the construction of subdivisions, like Kentlands in Gaithersburg, Md., and the Disney-created town of Celebration, Fla., which were built from scratch along new-urbanist lines. The Urban Land Institute, a nonprofit group that studies planning issues, says 5% to 15% of new development in the U.S. is designed at least to some extent with pedestrians in mind.

But new-urbanist thinking has fostered the refashioning of some existing suburbs and city neighborhoods, which have been reconstructed to blend stores with homes and make foot travel easier and more appealing. One of those retrofits is City Place in West Palm Beach, Fla., a 72-acre, $600 million development built to create a kind of instant secondary downtown. (The city's original downtown is not far away.) At its heart is an open-air plaza surrounded by shopping as well as a 20-screen cineplex, designed to resemble the Paris Opera House, and nearly 600 residential units, including town houses, apartments and lofts.

If City Place had a motto, it could be "We have ways of making you walk." Before they sat down at their computers, its architects spent several weeks abroad studying rambling Italian towns. In the covered walkways of City Place you can find an echo of the archway arcades of Bologna, one of the world's great cities for strolling. Spanish steps, bridges and other features tempt your feet forward. And there are no traffic lights. In City Place, pedestrians always have the right of way.

The rubric to describe developments like City Place is "urban living centers. Opened in 2000, City Place was one of the first, but it has spawned imitators in San Jose, Calif., and Charlotte, N.C. And it has been a hit, drawing more than 7 million visitors a year. Ophthalmologist Todd Shuba, 34, used to choose where to spend his lunch break by which restaurant had the most convenient parking lot. These days he walks a half-mile at least three times a week to eat at one of nearly 20 restaurants at City Place. "I walk a lot further, but I get the benefit of having everything right here," says Shuba, who might be pleased to know that walking a lot further is another one of the place's benefits.

Sometimes the solution to an obesity-sprawl problem is a matter not just of reconfiguring a town but of rethinking its roadways. For instance, only 17% of all schoolchildren walk to school, according to research firm Belden Russonello & Stewart. "The vast majority of children live within one mile of school," says Rich Killingsworth, a professor at the University of North Carolina. "But only 28% of those children walk there." Killingsworth is director of the Active Living by Design program, which funds projects that help communities become more pedestrian friendly. Programs like Safe Routes to School find ways to make it easier for kids to walk. "You can extend sidewalks to schools," he says. "You can calm traffic around the school. You can minimize parking lots so fewer students are driving to school."