Walkability "The extent to which the built environment is friendly to the presence of people living, shopping, visiting, enjoying or spending time in an area".
Walkability is a yardstick of distance or environment to walk. Usually, walkable distance is within 1.3 mile (2 km). But, walkability is measured by not only distance, but also many factors such as the quality of road, gradient of pathway, other pedestrians, safety, environment, level of closeness with buildings, and so on. In contemporary urban planning and design field, walkability is big issue to consider, because of benefits of walkability. Walkability is related with physical and mental health of local people. According to the research by Russel Lopez, walkability in a community brings personal and community benefits such as increasing the number of friends, pride of community, and reducing the number of obesity, crime because of more and more people walk on roads, carbon footprints by automobiles. In this circumstance that more than one third people suffer from obesity in U.S.A, planning and designing walkable city is the most important task for urban planner.
Urban planners used to design the cities for automobiles and neglect the needs of human being. For example, Brasilia, which is the capital of Brazil, was planed and developed by Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer. Massive buildings and roads that ignored human scale changed the city bad place to live. The long distance between buildings forced people to use a car, and beautiful street destroyed and abandoned.
Urban planners should try to build more walkable city to avoid to plan another destroyed city.
By Chaerin Jin
