Auditing Capability and Active Living in the Built Environment

Abstract

This study examines ‘built environment audit’ frameworks currently used in policy responses to the US obesity epidemic. The study considers the degree to which the informational bases of audits are constrained by their underlying definitions of distributive justice, and which of three kinds of audit—utilitarian, general resource, or capability—and which is most appropriate for informing an urban design response to the obesity epidemic.

Keywords:

• Capability approach
• Built environment
• Active living
• Obesity
• Evaluation

Notes

The conceptual model in Figure 1 also appears in my article, ‘Toward a general model of built environment audits,’ (see Lewis, 2011). That article was written for an audience of urban planning theorists, who are well aware of built environment audits and Active Living programs. In that article, the model was offered to provoke discussion about the philosophical underpinnings of audits, about which the planning field has been heretofore silent. In the current article, the Figure 1 model is offered to introduce audits and Active Living to development economics theorists and practitioners, whom I assume are less familiar with audits and Active Living, but fully familiar with the application of theories of distributive justice to the metrics of social evaluation.

In a previous article (Lewis 2011), mentioned in Note 1 above, a table describes the egalitarian distibutions of the most popular audits used in the field today. Although many of the same audits are the subjects in both, Table 1 in the current study is not substantially drawn from that earlier table. Many of the same audits appear in both tables simply because these are the most important, and most commonly used, instruments in the field.

Early substantive discussions of evaluative planning ethics can be found in the work of Nathaniel Lichfield in the 1960's and 70's, for example Lichfield et al. (1975). One of Lichfield's legacies is his extension of the then-dominant utilitarian public interest criterion to consider the diverse costs of a development project on heterogeneous individuals. Another legacy is this idea that the evaluation of plans always presuppose an ethical outlook, described in Moroni (2006), found in the excellent companion to Lichfield's work on plan evaluation edited by Alexander (2006).

In urban design, few theorists have considered evaluative ethics at greater depth and with greater urgency than Kevin Lynch (1984) in Good City Form. In the same vein as Lichfield, Lynch tells us, ‘When values go unexamined they are dangerous’ (p. 34). Good City Form is largely devoted to the question of how the built environment is evaluated as a good.

I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out the importance of this shift.

There are of course numerous critiques of the currency approach, described in Vallentyne (2007). He also argues that another important reason to bring responsibility into the argument is that it frames the idea of justice in historical terms and not simply as a critique of current conditions, and thus is more about how we live together as equals than which goods we share equally. As Wolff (2007, p. 135) explains, the difference theorists argued that egalitarianism is properly not about distributions of some currency at all but instead should be about a ‘quality of relations’ between individuals. This echoes somewhat in Sheffler's argument (2004, p. 31) that egalitarianism must be about the ‘kinds of relations in which we want to stand to our fellow citizens’.

We know that Lynch was aware of the Theory of Justice, and in Good City Form he acknowledges his debt to Rawls (p. 227). Lynch's critique did not produce a direct response to Rawls as Sen's did, but the questions that Lynch raised were certainly along the lines of the capability approach. Lynch was critical of equality of resources as the metric for evaluating access: ‘Surely a handicapped or ill person requires more than a healthy one?…can a child cope with the same amount of goods than an adult can?’ (p. 225). Or consider Lynch's argument that environmental resources must address the specific needs of residents: ‘A sparkling variety of high-fashion clothing stores is of little interest to someone on a scant clothes budget’ (p. 192).

There is no evidence that Lynch was aware of the work of his contemporary Amartya Sen. Yet it is interesting to note that Lynch and Sen were simultaneously developing arguments for placing the individual at the center of evaluations of well-being, one in urban design and the other in development economics. Consider Lynch's Senean ‘preoccupation with individual development’ (1984, p. 230). This echoes in Lynch's methodological argument for evaluating ‘diversity of access’ which varies according to cultural and other identities (pp. 201–202). It is also seen in Lynch's concern for placing diverse individuals at the heart of the evaluation. Or, for example, ‘The environment is to be valued by the way in which it is individually experienced…' (p. 366).

For examples of audit developers using Lynch's terminology, see Day et al. (2006), also Ewing and Clemente (2005), also Jacobs and Appleyard (1987).

Those who are familiar with Kuklys's modeling of the capability approach will recognize my debt to her (Kuklys 2005). Of particular applicability in terms of the built environment is her operationalizing of goods conversion as a vector of resource characteristics, modified by the individual's personal, social, and environmental conversion factors, or constraints upon the ability to turn resources to functionings. bi = fi[C(xi)|zi, zs, ze] Where the desired functioning b is a conversion of some vector C of characteristics of a commodity x, modified by ‘conversion factors’ z,s,e, representing individual characteristics, and social and environmental circumstances.

It should be noted that the IMI developers recognized the limitations caused by their not taking heterogeneous identity into consideration, and noted it in their report on the audit development process (Boarnet et al., 2005). In their conclusions they say,

Focus group questions might have generated more novel responses if participants had been questioned about how their own identities (as teens, low-income individuals) influenced their opportunities for active living. (p. 150; emphasis added)

I have in mind Sen's definition of the agent as ‘. . . someone who acts and brings about change, and whose achievements can be judged in terms of her own values and objectives . . .’ (Sen, 2000, p. 19).

Such ‘kinship care’ situations, in which grandparents have parental custody of their grandchildren, is a growing phenomenon in poor neighborhoods in the US (Hayslip and Kaminski, 2005; Musil et al., 2006) My using kinship care as an example is by no means to suggest that it is by definition a problem: It is in fact often of benefit to the child to be raised by a relative rather than a non-relative foster parent. Rather, my point is that if kinship care researchers took built environment capability into account, it could broaden the critique to include how environments determine the actual ability of kinship care children to convert the resources they possess. To date in the kinship care literature, only Berrick (1997) specifically evaluates the neighborhood built environment in terms that could be framed as Senean unfreedoms.

Sen uses examples such as the person who has food to eat, but also has dysentery and therefore cannot absorb nutrients. In the built environment, we might consider that having a public park directly across the street from a child's home does not imply physical wellbeing if violent criminal activity keeps the child indoors and out of the park.

Harper and Stein's place-based primary goods are what I have described as the opportunities that people need in order to pursue whatever wellbeing ends they wish. In terms of a built environment capability metric, the individual's proportionate holding of such opportunities is described as modified by the individual's relative agency.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ferdinand Lewis

Ferdinand Lewis, Ph.D, is Lecturer in Urban and Regional Planning in the School of Landscape Architecture and Planning, College of Design, Construction and Planning at the University of Florida in Gainesville, FL, USA.