Research in transportation, urban design, and planning has examined associations between physical environment variables and individuals' walking and cycling for transport. Constructs, methods, and findings from these fields can be applied by physical activity and health researchers to improve understanding of environmental influences on physical activity. In this review, neighborhood environment characteristics proposed to be relevant to walking/cycling for transport are defined, including population density, connectivity, and land use mix. Neighborhood comparison and correlational studies with nonmotorized transport outcomes are considered, with evidence suggesting that residents from communities with higher density, greater connectivity, and more land use mix report higher rates of walking/cycling for utilitarian purposes than low-density, poorly connected, and single land use neighborhoods. Environmental variables appear to add to variance accounted for beyond sociodemographic predictors of walking/cycling for transport. Implications of the transportation literature for physical activity and related research are outlined. Future research directions are detailed for physical activity research to further examine the impact of neighborhood and other physical environment factors on physical activity and the potential interactive effects of psychosocial and environmental variables. The transportation, urban design, and planning literatures provide a valuable starting point for multidisciplinary research on environmental contributions to physical activity levels in the population.

Environmental correlates of walking and cycling: Findings from the transportation, urban design, and planning literatures

Planners concerned with water resource protection in urbanizing areas must deal with the adverse impacts of polluted runoff. Impervious surface coverage is a quantifiable land-use indicator that correlates closely with these impacts. Once the role and distribution of impervious coverage are understood, a wide range of strategies to reduce impervious surfaces and their impacts on water resources can be applied to community planning, site-level planning and design, and land use regulation. These strategies complement many current trends in planning, zoning, and landscape design that go beyond water pollution concerns to address the quality of life in a community.

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Impervious surface coverage: the emergence of a key environmental indicator

Ecologically responsible policies are concerned only in part with pollution and resource depletion. There are deeper concerns which touch upon principles of diversity, complexity, autonomy, decentralization, symbiosis, egalitarianism, and classlessness.

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The shallow and the deep, long‐range ecology movement. A summary∗

Ecological studies of terrestrial urban systems have been approached along several kinds of contrasts: ecology in as opposed to ecology of cities; biogeochemical compared to organismal perspectives, land use planning versus biological, and disciplinary versus interdisciplinary. In order to point out how urban ecological studies are poised for significant integration, we review key aspects of these disparate literatures. We emphasize an open definition of urban systems that accounts for the exchanges of material and influence between cities and surrounding landscapes. Research on ecology in urban systems highlights the nature of the physical environment, including urban climate, hydrology, and soils. Biotic research has studied flora, fauna, and vegetation, including trophic effects of wildlife and pets. Unexpected interactions among soil chemistry, leaf litter quality, and exotic invertebrates exemplify the novel kinds of interactions that can occur in urban systems. Vegetation and faunal responses suggest that the configuration of spatial heterogeneity is especially important in urban systems. This insight parallels the concern in the literature on the ecological dimensions of land use planning. The contrasting approach of ecology of cities has used a strategy of biogeochemical budgets, ecological footprints, and summaries of citywide species richness. Contemporary ecosystem approaches have begun to integrate organismal, nutrient, and energetic approaches, and to show the need for understanding the social dimensions of urban ecology. Social structure and the social allocation of natural and institutional resources are subjects that are well understood within social sciences, and that can be readily accommodated in ecosystem models of metropolitan areas. Likewise, the sophisticated understanding of spatial dimensions of social differentiation has parallels with concepts and data on patch dynamics in ecology and sets the stage for comprehensive understanding of urban ecosystems. The linkages are captured in the human ecosystem framework.

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Urban ecological systems: linking terrestrial ecological, physical, and socioeconomic components of metropolitan areas

http://urbansustainability.snre.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Defining-Urban-Resilience_Meerow_Newell_Stults.pdf

Defining urban resilience: A review

City and Countryside Sea and Survival The Plight A Step Forward The Cast and the Capsule Nature in the Metropolis On Values A Response to Values The World is a Capsule Processes as Values The Naturalists The River Basin The Metropolitan Region Process and Forum The City - Health and Pathology Prospect.

Design with nature

Human ecological planning at Pennsylvania

Growing Up in Scotland. Soldier, 1939-1946. Harvard, 1946-1950. Scotland, 1950-1954. University of Pennsylvania, 1954-1964. Design with Nature, 1964-1970. The Environmental Decade. A New Life. Retrospect and Prospect. A Poem to the World's Children. Chronology. List of Awards. Bibliography and Inventory of Projects. Index.

A Quest for Life: An Autobiography

Unparalleled urban growth is pre-empting a million acres of rural lands each year and transforming these into the sad emblems of contemporary urbanism. In that anarchy which constitutes urban growth, wherein the major prevailing values are short-term economic determinism, the image of nature is attributed little or no value. In existing cities, the instincts of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century city builders, reflected in the pattern of existing urban open space, have been superseded by a modern process which disdains nature and seems motivated by a belief in salvation through stone alone. Yet there is a need and place for nature in the city of man. An understanding of natural processes should be reflected in the attribution of value to the constituents of these natural processes. Such an understanding, reflected in city building, will provide a major structure for urban and metro politan form, an environment capable of supporting physiolog ical man, and the basis for an art of city building which will e...

Ian L. McHarg

Papers

Design with nature

Human ecological planning at Pennsylvania

A Quest for Life: An Autobiography

The Place of Nature in the City of Man

The Essential Ian McHarg: Writings on Design and Nature