Residential Neighborhood/Area

Vaez and colleagues studied how people using different wayfinding tools traveled through a place they had never been before. Researchers worked with  “three groups of participants who used different navigational aids: a group with a paper map, a group with the Google Maps app, and a group relying on local signage only. . . .  participants who had never visited Brisbane, Australia. . . . undertook a two-hour pedestrian wayfinding task. . . . The GPS group preferred to follow the suggested route by their navigator, most of them ‘locking in’ as digital navigators throughout the task.

Li and colleagues studied how streetscapes influence walking in Boston.  They report that “Publicly accessible Google Street View images were used to estimate the amount of street greenery. . . .  Statistical analysis results show that the associations between human walking activities and the streetscape variables vary among different land use types after controlling the confounding variable of the Walk Score and population. . .

Portegijs and colleagues studied how neighborhood features influence the (self-reported) physical activity/mobility of older (79-94 year old) residents of a Finnish community. They asked study participants to indicate “destinations perceived to facilitate and barriers perceived to hinder outdoor mobility in their neighborhood. . . . analyses adjusted for age, sex, and physical performance showed that neighborhood destinations increased the odds for higher physical activity when located beyond 500 m from home . . . but not when located solely within 500 m . . .

Kuhlmann evaluated the effects of tearing down deteriorating houses on the condition of nearby homes. He investigated “whether exposure to targeted demolitions of abandoned and distressed housing affects changes in the external condition of nearby houses.  Using two waves of a property inventory in Cleveland, Ohio, [Kuhlmann’s] models suggest that, compared with a control group of houses located near vacant housing, proximity to demolitions decreases the likelihood that a property’s condition deteriorated between 2015 and 2018 and increases the likelihood that it improved.”

Hidalgo and colleagues studied how bonds to urban places are related to how well cared for those spaces are.  The team report that “Research in environmental psychology has found a positive relationship between place bonds and behaviors related to care and maintenance of place. Although this relationship has been analyzed in natural environments. . . . The participants [in this study] were . . . from eight different neighborhoods with different sociodemographic characteristics in one Spanish city.