Walkability and walking behavior in the people-environment transactional approach

Abstract

The concept of walkability can be found in the literature of various disciplines, such as urban planning, health care, sustainability, mental illness, environmental psychology, and sociology, often involving closely overlapping topics. Making the urban environment more walkable has environmental (less pollution, sustainability), personal (mental and physical health, social factors), and economic advantages, therefore the examination and measuring of the concept are crucial at both the micro and macro levels.

The aim of this paper is to discuss the concept of walkability, a scarcely investigated topic in Hungary, in the approach of people-environment transaction. This approach emphasizes the consistent interrelationship between people and the environment and underlines that the physical environment is also socially determined: i.e., the environment should be defined as socio-physical.

This study is intended to provide some support for a holistic, environmental psychological research agenda and the development of the concept of walkability in Hungary. In this vein, our study first provides an overview of the definitional emphases of the concept, followed by environmental, and personal characteristics related to walkability that according to the transactional approach are difficult to separate in practice. The paper also discusses objective, measurable environmental characteristics as well as their perceived, subjective variants, the role of concordance between the objective and perceived environmental characteristics, complex perceptual qualities, and their ecological models. From the perspective of personal characteristics, sociodemographic variables (gender, age, race), mental health, social factors, and personality are presented as factors associated with walkability. The discussed examples of walkability-related research and ecological models highlight the complexity of the concept, the measurement and intervention options. The internal relations within and the interrelationships of the objective and perceived environmental attributes and space users’ characteristics, with an emphasis on the importance of space users’ perceptions, are summarized in our transactional theoretical ecological framework model of walkability and walking behaviour. We also suggest a possible transactional definition of walkability: Walkability is a constantly, due partly to the realized walking behaviour, changing attribute of the built environment, expressing the extent to which the given environment encourages walking due to the complex pattern of its characteristics: these characteristics can be objective or considered important or perceived in different ways according to the space users’ attributes, and are interrelated with each other and the realized walking behaviour.

Since most research projects on walkability do not reveal causal relationships, this study also intends to highlight such characteristics too that may (simultaneously) be the cause and effect of walking behaviour. In our theoretical transactional ecological framework model, relationships are directly or indirectly bidirectional due to the transactional approach and the unexploredness of causality. For example, the characteristics of space users may affect the walking behaviour regardless of the walkability of the environment, may moderate the relationship between walkability and walking behaviour, and may also be affected by the realized walking behaviour.

Due to the richness of the international literature, this study does not strive for completeness in terms of the discussed characteristics and results, and the complexity of the relationships. It merely aims to highlight the importance of the transactional approach in the interpretation, research, and development of walkability. Our theoretical framework model should also be interpreted only at the level of characteristic groups since we have not indicated all the elements of each group and the relationships are not valid for all elements. Nevertheless, our model can be a basis for transactional empirical research on walkability.