A comparative case study of walking environment in Madrid and Philadelphia using multiple sampling methods and street virtual audits

ABSTRACT

The objective of this study is to quantify, using virtual audits in Madrid and Philadelphia, cross-city differences in the walking environment and to test whether differences vary by sampling method. We used two sampling methods; first, a contiguous area combining census units (~15.000 population area for each setting) was selected using the Median Neighborhood Index. Median Neighborhood Index is a summary index that averages Euclidean distances of sociodemographic and urban form features, used to select the median neighborhood for a given city. Second, we selected a population-density stratified sampling of the same number of census units as above. M-SPACES audit tool was deployed, using street virtual audits to measure function, safety, aesthetics, and destinations along each street segment. Madrid streets had lower scores for function (b = −0.29 CI95% −0.55; −0.31) and safety (b = −0.38 CI95% −0.61; -0.14). Madrid had a greater proportion of streets having at least one walking destination in the street segment (PR = 1.92 95% CI 1.55; 2.39). We did not find a significant difference between Madrid and Philadelphia in aesthetics. We found an interaction between safety and sampling methods. This approach can reveal which elements of the built environment account for between-city differences, key to mass influences that operate at the city level.

KEYWORDS:

• Walkability
• built environment
• cities
• omnidirectional image
• virtual image

This article is related to:

Research for city practice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme [FP7/2007-2013/ERC Starting Grant Heart Healthy Hoods Agreement No. 336893]. PG was supported by the 2018 Alfonso Martín Escudero Research Grant. UB was supported by the Ofce of the Director of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number [DP5OD26429].

Notes on contributors

Pedro Gullón

Pedro Gullón MD, Ph.D., is a Postdoctoral Research at Universidad de Alcalá (Spain). He completed his doctoral program in Epidemiology and Public Health at the University of Alcalá where he wrote his dissertation on the integration of different measures of walkability in the city of Madrid. His research interests are neighborhood walkability, the role of neighborhood dynamics on urban health inequities and the use of mixed methods.

Usama Bilal

Usama Bilal is Assistant Professor in the Urban Health Collaborative and the Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics at Drexel's Dornsife School of Public Health. His primary research interest is the macrosocial determinants of health, specifically nutrition-related conditions and their upstream causes. Most of his work focuses on the role that city- and neighborhood-level dynamics have in generating disease, and the use of complexity methodologies to study the emergent properties of urban environments. He has earned degrees from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (PhD), Universidad de Alcala (MPH) and Universidad de Oviedo (MD).

Patricia Sánchez

Patricia Sánchez is currently working in the Microbiology research group at the Ramón y Cajal University Hospital and finishing her degree in Health Biology at the University of Alcalá. Since 2018 she has collaborated with the Public Health and Epidemiology research group at the same university. Her interests focus on the amount of risk factors related to cardiovascular diseases, specifically stress and obesity.

Julia Díez

Julia Díez works in the Public Health and Epidemiology research group at the Universidad de Alcalá. Her research interests focus on the determinants of dietary behaviors, obesity, and cardiovascular diseases. Specifically, she analyzes access to both healthy and unhealthy foods in the city of Madrid, and their associations with residents' dietary patterns and cardiovascular risk. Other research interests include using participatory research methods as part of population health intervention research. As such, she is interested in engaging residents and other stakeholders in exploring how social features of the local food environment affect food purchasing habits and dietary patterns.

Gina S. Lovasi

Gina S. Lovasi, PhD, MPH is Dornsife Associate Professor of Urban Health and Co-Director of the Urban Health Collaborative at Drexel University Dornsife School of Public Health. She has published more than 100 articles in peer-reviewed journals and had the opportunity to give invited presentations on four continents. Though trained in epidemiology, she works in multidisciplinary teams to incorporate of GIS data into a range of health-related research projects. In addition, she serves as an associate editor for the American Journal of Epidemiology and on the executive board for the International Society of Urban Health.

Manuel Franco

Manuel Franco, Social Epidemiologist, associate faculty at the University of Alcalá and adjunct faculty at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Principal Investigator of the Heart Healthy Hoods (http://www.hhhproject.eu) studying urban characteristics in relation to eating patterns, physical activity levels, smoking and alcohol consumption. His work focuses on the social epidemiology and prevention of chronic diseases and their major risk factors. His methodological interests include the measurement of physical and social urban characteristics related to chronic diseases, the use of mixed methods and the conduction of participatory action research methods.