June 7, 2004
Even more detailed evidence of the obesity-sprawl connection appears in a new study led by Lawrence Frank, a professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Frank surveyed nearly 11,000 people in Atlanta, compiling their body mass indexes (BMIs) and correlating those figures with the characteristics of the neighborhood within a kilometer of their homes, including whether shops and services were mixed in among the homes. He asked participants to keep a travel diary for two days to record where they went and how they got there.

What Frank discovered was that for every hour people spend in their cars, they are 6% more likely to be obese. For every kilometer—just over a half-mile—they walk in a day, they are 5% less likely to be obese. And if they live in a mixed-use environment (one in which there are shops and services near their homes), they are 7% less likely to be obese—probably because they walk more. "The policy implication of this study," says Frank, "is that if we're going to solve our public-health issues, we're going to have to address the built environment."

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."

Another major goal of active-living proponents is to change the raft of zoning regulations, local ordinances and building codes—most of them adopted after the first great wave of post-World War II suburbanization—that were explicitly designed to discourage denser development. Very often those rules clearly forbid mixed-use areas (residential and commercial in the same neighborhood, for example), which would bring people within walking distance of a store to buy a quart of milk. And until we change how America is built, how Americans are built will be a continuing problem.

Watch Good Morning America on Tuesday, June 1, for more on how communities promote walking

— With reporting by Kathie Klarreich/West Palm Beach and Steve Korris/Columbia

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