Institutional practices and planning for walking: A focus on built environment audits

Abstract

Built environment audits, part of the “toolbox” for planning multi-modal urban transport systems, are used to evaluate the walkability of streets. Whereas the methodological features of audits have attracted attention from planning research, little attention has been paid to the institutional contexts where audits are developed and used. Drawing on literature on audit culture in contemporary institutions and on expert interviews with audit developers and professionals in Australia and New Zealand working with walking audits, three questions are addressed: Who uses walkability audits? How are they used? What substantive changes emerge from auditing practice? The knowledge of practice of auditing the built environment for walking is underdeveloped. While planners, engineers and advocates consider built environment audits useful in different ways, of concern is the use of audits to rationalise limited resources already devoted to infrastructure for walking, rather than produce substantive changes to the quality of the built environment for walking.

Keywords:

• walking
• built environment audits
• audit culture
• automobility

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant (DP1094495). We would like to thank all interviewees for their time and insights. We also acknowledge and appreciate the constructive feedback provided by three anonymous reviewers and editors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We acknowledge that local governments and community groups are not limited to using only those tools promoted to them by national and state jurisdictions but it was beyond the scope of this research to investigate the range of possible tools used at local government level.

2. Travel behaviour change officers were established by the State Department of Transport (Western Australia) in the 1990s as part of the introduction of a TravelSmart programme set up to implement new transport mode share targets aimed at car travel reduction. The TravelSmart programme is now Australia-wide with officers employed at both State and Local Government levels. See http://www.transport.wa.gov.au/activetransport/24607.asp.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council [grant number DP1094495].