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This chapter introduces how the built environment and walking are connected. It looks at the interrelationships within the built environment, and how those are changing given planning and policy efforts to facilitate increased walking for both leisure activity and commuting. Using a broad review and case-based approach, the chapter examines this epistemological development of walking and the built environment over time, reviews the connections, policies and design strategies and emerging issues. The chapter shows many cases of cities which are creating a more walkable environment. It also reveals that emerging issues related to technology and autonomous vehicles, vision zero and car-free cities, and increased regional policy may play a continued role in shaping the built environment for walking. This dialogue provides both a core underpinning and a future vision for how the built environment can continue to influence and respond to pedestrians in shaping a more walkable world.

This chapter focusses on entrepreneurship and policies of public services in England, specifically leisure centre provision in the UK during the late twentieth century. The central role played by local authorities in sport provision was complimented by an increasing cadre of leisure sector professionals and with increasing architectural interest in the provision of leisure. The institutional context was framed by the Sports Development Council (SDC) after 1965 together with the broader action of local authorities who aimed to provide their ratepayers with access to improved sport and leisure services. The resulting leisure centres were perhaps a way to signal the prestige of local authorities but were expensive investments. The capability of local authorities was boosted by the local government reforms of the 1970s, which merged districts, pooling their resources. The possibility of support from private capital and after 1973 from the European Economic Community (EEC) also provided new opportunities for the organizational form. Eventually, there was a shift in emphasis from the provision of organized sport to that of more individualized and commercialized “leisure” as a product. Whether or not this achieved the long-term aims of central government, to improve access to sport and to tackle urban challenges, remains questionable. However, the story of leisure provision in the UK remains one of remarkable public sector entrepreneurship within an institutional context.

On 2 February 2020, 99.9 million viewers learnt about the Women's Football Alliance (WFA), the largest women's American football league in the United States, when former player Katie Sowers became the first woman to coach in the Super Bowl. In the same month, the WFA announced several corporate partnerships and a new television deal with statements that connected the support for women's American football to advancing gender equity.

This chapter examines the professionalisation of women's American football in the United States through the lens of mediated visibilities. We use the term mediated visibilities, rather than media coverage, to move beyond how journalists are writing about sport (or ‘covering’ sport) and account for the complex ways in which content about women's sport circulates across producers and platforms in the digital media environment. In particular, our analysis examines the opportunities and limitations of digital media in the process of (semi-)professionalisation of women's American football.

The WFA joined the broader ‘momentum’ of women's sport in the United States as both the league's social media platforms and the sponsors aligned their messages with cultural narratives around women's sport to invoke gender equity in promoting women's American football. Moreover, the league positioned the strategy to enhance mediated visibility the sport as an integral step in the process of (semi-)professionalisation. However, the role of the WFA's digital media platforms alone appears to be limited without substantial structural change.

We propose an information-based view of the dynamics of network positions and use it to explain why bridging positions become stronger. We depart from previous network dynamics studies that implicitly assume that firms have homogenous information about the network structure. Using network experiments with both students and managers, we vary a firm's network horizon (i.e., how much information a firm has about the network structure) and the network horizon heterogeneity (i.e., how this information is distributed among the firms within the network). Our results indicate that firms with a higher network horizon occupy a stronger bridging position, especially under conditions of high network horizon heterogeneity. At a more general level, these results provide an indirect validation of what so far has been an untested assumption in interfirm network research, namely that firms are aware of their position in the overall network and consciously attempt to improve their position.

I elected to be guided by Alexander Astin's (1984, 1985, 1993) theory of student involvement in examining the experiences of first-generation African-American women in the technology-driven classroom because it is one of the most used and time-tested theory in the college student development literature (Pascarella & Terenzini, 2005). Astin's theory has established that students learn by becoming involved with their peers and instructors in educationally purposeful activities. Given the onslaught of technology-driven teaching and learning practices and the literature that supports the importance of learning through interaction, examining their interactivity with the course content, faculty, and peers is an important topic to research.

This chapter focuses on the presence and accomplishments of Black women across the leadership spectrum within the context of historically Black colleges and universities.