Design for Active Living in and Around Buildings: Look Back and Look Forward Using Workplace and School As Examples

Xuemei Zhu; Aya Yoshikawa; Lingyi Qiu; Zhipeng Lu

Background: “Active living” is a way of life that integrates physical activity (PA) into daily routines. In the past few decades, it has been increasingly studied by researchers and promoted by multiple professions in response to the growing obesity epidemic. There is now a significant body of empirical evidence linking activity-friendly environments with increased PA.

Goals and Approach: However, most of the previous research focused on neighborhood and urban scales. In contrast, active living in and around buildings are under-studied despite the fact people spend 90% of time inside buildings. This presentation reviews recent accomplishments in active living research and practice, and looks ahead to address the gap of knowledge on building level using two important building types as examples. The presenter has been working on active living research since 2005, with support from NIH, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and AIA, etc. The first section summarizes findings from systematic literature reviews on how workplace and school environments influence PA of employees and students, respectively, following the PRISMA Guidelines. The second section proposes a conceptual framework for future active living research on building level, while outlining natural experiment research opportunities for advancing the status of knowledge and promoting evidence-based practice.

Workplace impacts: The results from 59 relevant articles (2000-2017) demonstrated environmental impacts form three spatial scales. Work station is the most studied scale, with sit/stand desks, treadmill desks, and cycling/elliptical machine stations leading to reductions in SB (33–125 minutes/8-hour-workday) and increases of PA (79–121 minutes/8-hour-wrokday). Building-scale correlates include circulation and breakout spaces, building layout, and other destinations throughout the building. Neighborhood-scale factors include distance and route characteristics for work commute, and neighborhood destinations and PA amenities.

School influences: School studies reported similar environmental correlates for students’ PA from three scales. Sit-standing desks and other activity-permissive study stations were found to promote PA. School buildings influence PA through the overall layout, destinations throughout the building, and the size and design of school site, especially outdoor spaces. On neighborhood scale, the school-neighborhood relationship (e.g. neighborhood school or not) and neighborhood walkability influence students’ PA by affecting their school travel mode (walking/biking vs. bus or private vehicles) and use of school facilities for PA outside school hours.

Conclusion: Overall, previous studies revealed significant potential for workplace/school environment to influence PA among employees/students. Yet study quality is limited by selection bias, confounders, difficulty of blinding, and lack of control groups and long-term assessments. Very little is known about how workplace/school environment as a whole, including all three scales, influence PA/SB throughout the workday or school day. There are very limited studies on actual intervention impacts from new building constructions of renovations. For future research and practice, it is important to adopt a more rigorous and holistic approach and consider multiple environmental scales, while considering contextual factors. Impacts of workplace/school environments on health and performance should also be further explored. Researchers should work with designers and building users to develop natural experiment studies to better understand causal impacts of environmental interventions on PA changes.