Urban Environment Shapes Children's Health Behaviours, Green Spaces Linked to Decreased Sedentary Activities: Study

Landscapes and the infrastructural design of a place influence the health behaviours of people. Then, how does it influence children? Exploring this question, a latest study conducted in six European countries has found that children living in an urban environment consisting of more green space, lower population density, higher building densities, and without major roads are less sedentary in their day-to-day life and more likely to walk or cycle to school.

Conducted by the researchers of the Barcelona Institute for Global Health, the study has been recently published in the journal Environment International. Specifically, the study concludes that children living in more natural spaces are physically more active, spend lesser time in sedentary activities, get more hours of sleep and like to walk or cycle to their schools.

The study reflects on the growing fields of interest that investigate how the urban environment can contribute to the health behaviours among children and how a change in the design of urban spaces can keep children at bay from unhealthy behaviours. The study attempted to assess the association between a wide range of urban environmental characteristics and health habits of 1581 children aged between six to 11 years in six different European cohorts. Most studies in this field have concentrated on the effects of urban environment on adults, that too on a single type of exposure. The new research has gone further in assessing the link between a wide variety of urban environments and children’s health behaviour.

The researchers estimated exposure to 32 varieties of urban environments near the homes and schools of the children. These include traffic density on the nearest road coupled with the presence of green spaces like forest and vegetation and blue spaces like beaches, rivers etc. The researchers also assessed the health habits of the children like time spent on physical activities, ranging from moderate to vigorous, physical activities outside school hours, transport behaviours like cycling or walking etc., along with sedentary activities and sleep duration. The researchers developed a model that encompasses multiple exposures with the help of the data collected from the six different cohorts across Europe.

The analysis revealed that active transport like walking and cycling increased and sedentary time spending decreased among children living in spaces having more green exposure. The study also found that proximity to a major road was associated with a shorter duration of sleep.

“Our findings have implications for urban planning policies. Public health interventions tend to focus on influencing individual behaviours rather than tackling the broader system determinants that drive these behaviours and widen health inequalities. Our evidence reinforces the need to prioritise urban design to improve health-promoting behaviours in children and prevent ill health in adults. One such strategy should be to increase the number of green spaces and the amount of vegetation in the streets,” commented Martine Vrijheid, co-author of the study.

He said in his statement explaining the future research implications, “We need further research that includes other urban indicators that may be relevant for the behaviour of children and adolescents, such as pedestrian zones and sports facilities (for example, ping-pong tables, volleyball courts, etc.), and which looks at more countries and less-studied areas in order to better assess how changes in the urban environment affect people’s lifestyles.”

However, the study found that a large section of the children, around 63.6%, did not meet the WHO (World Health Organization) recommendation of 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activities per day. Along with this, the study found that 58.6% of the children spent more than two hours a day watching television or playing video games.

The study included cohorts from the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Lithuania, Norway and Greece.