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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.

Sustainable transport is often defined according to energy efficiency and environmental impacts. With global approval during Habitat III, however, a set of Sustainable Development Goals have become the focus for human development until 2030, underlining the relevance of health, equity and other social issues.

These goals raise the challenge of achieving significant progress towards ‘transport justice’ in diverse societies and contexts. While exclusion occurs for different reasons, discrimination, based on cultural roles, combines with sexual harassment and other mobility barriers to limit women’s mobility. This makes gender an area of particular interest and potential insight for considering equity within sustainability and its social components.

Using data from Metropolitan Santiago to ground a conceptual exploration, this chapter examines the equity implications of women’s travel patterns and sustainable transport. Key findings underline the importance of considering non-work trip purposes and achieving better land-use combinations to accommodate care-oriented trips. Moreover, barriers linked to unsafe public transport environments limit women’s mobility and, therefore, their participation. Women account for a disproportionately high number of walking trips, a situation that can be interpreted as ‘greater sustainability’ in terms of energy use and emissions, but suggests significant inequalities in access. Environmental and economic sustainability gains may be achieved at a high social cost, unless specific measures are taken.

This chapter studies the link between urban planning and health. Access to safe drinking water is already a very serious issue for large urban populations in fast-growing economies such as India. Water availability is further being impacted by climate change, leading to the drastically increased spread of water-related diseases.

Leh Town, which is located in an ecologically vulnerable semi-arid region of the Himalayas in Ladakh, has been considered for this study because it is undergoing large-scale transformation due to rapid growth in its tourism industry. In 2012–2013 our interdisciplinary group comprising researchers from Germany and India conducted field surveys, including geographic information system-based (GIS) mapping of point sources of water pollution, questionnaire surveys of 200 households and 70 hotels and guesthouses and semi-structured interviews. We also reviewed secondary medical data.

We found that diarrhoeal incidence has increased in the local population in Leh in the past decade, which may be linked to water pollution: Further, we found that rapidly increasing water consumption coupled with a lack of adequate water and sanitation infrastructure is causing serious water pollution.

Further, data is needed for causal connections between water pollution and health impacts to be conclusively drawn.

This study discusses the use of GIS to support a call for the need for more integrated urban planning and decision-making that holistically addresses water and health challenges in Leh and advocates the development of a decentralized or hybrid sanitation system to support water resources conservation as a central dimension of an integrated health management approach.

GIS is also a very useful platform for supporting participatory urban planning in Leh.

With such an integrated urban planning approach, Leh would be a lighthouse example for other towns in the region.

Health scientists and urban planners have long been interested in the influence that the built environment has on the physical activities in which we engage, the environmental hazards we face, the kinds of amenities we enjoy, and the resulting impacts on our health. However, it is widely recognized that the extent of this influence, and the specific cause-and-effect relationships that exist, are still relatively unclear. Recent reviews highlight the need for more individual-level data on daily activities (especially physical activity) over long periods of time linked spatially to real-world characteristics of the built environment in diverse settings, along with a wide range of personal mediating variables. While capturing objective data on the built environment has benefited from wide-scale availability of detailed land use and transport network databases, the same cannot be said of human activity. A more diverse history of data collection methods exists for such activity and continues to evolve owing to a variety of quickly emerging wearable sensor technologies. At present, no “gold standard” method has emerged for assessing physical activity type and intensity under the real-world conditions of the built environment; in fact, most methods have barely been tested outside of the laboratory, and those that have tend to experience significant drops in accuracy and reliability. This paper provides a review of these diverse methods and emerging technologies, including biochemical, self-report, direct observation, passive motion detection, and integrated approaches. Based on this review and current needs, an integrated three-tiered methodology is proposed, including: (1) passive location tracking (e.g., using global positioning systems); (2) passive motion/biometric tracking (e.g., using accelerometers); and (3) limited self-reporting (e.g., using prompted recall diaries). Key development issues are highlighted, including the need for proper validation and automated activity-detection algorithms. The paper ends with a look at some of the key lessons learned and new opportunities that have emerged at the crossroads of urban studies and health sciences.

We do have a vision for a world in which people can walk to shops, school, friends' homes, or transit stations; in which they can mingle with their neighbors and admire trees, plants, and waterways; in which the air and water are clean; and in which there are parks and play areas for children, gathering spots for teens and the elderly, and convenient work and recreation places for the rest of us. (Frumkin, Frank, & Jackson, 2004, p. xvii)

This study models competition in local deposit markets between for‐profit and not‐for‐profit financial institutions. For‐profit retail banks may offer a superior bundle of financial services, but not‐for‐profit (occupational) credit unions enjoy subsidies from their sponsors (and exemption from federal income taxes), which allow them to capture a share of the local market. The model predicts that, at the county level, greater participation in credit unions is associated with higher levels of retail‐banking concentration. This hypothesis is supported by empirical evidence for the period 1990‐2000, but not for the most recent past (2001‐2002). The ability of credit unions to affect local banking market structure supports the presumption of current banking anti trust analysis that retail banking markets are local. Further, this study provides an empirical analysis of how local economic conditions‐income per capita and population density‐affect competition between banks and credit unions.

Informal dwellings describe makeshift lodgings made from temporary materials, such as plastic, corrugated iron, sheeting, packing cases, or wood. These units allow low-income groups to informally occupy land and create their habitable space in a phased manner. This article focuses on elements of the urban morphology, such as density, accessibility, and operating assortment of informally built areas in the southern region of Montenegro.

The author examines the urban morphologies of four urban areas, whose informality is traditionally viewed as markers of decline and despair. Using observations, questionnaires, and semi-structured interviews, the investigator maps dwellings in Ulcinj, Budva, Tivat, and Herceg Novi neighbourhoods. The researcher interrogated participants about land distribution during the construction of sheds, buildings' outline and orientation toward the street, and activities performed in their dwellings, such as living, working, and accommodating relatives and guests. This methodology tests the hypothesis, formulated as a deeper understanding of urban morphology for examining the interweaving of informally built settlements with the rest of the city.

A cartographic investigation is used to reframe customary rights of low-income populations to land inclusion and their place in the city. The results clearly show that the location and lifestyle are designed to obfuscate the vulnerable populations from the public view, disconnected from policymaking, and ignored by urban planning projects. However, the interviewees' destinations orientation away from the downtowns represents the possibility of reconfiguring existing urban planning practices. For creating alternative urbanisation, the orientation of less visible neighbourhoods presents a model for building regulations embedded in social forces and cultural habits of all social and ethnic groups.

This study did not address the implementation of social hosing policies and the logistical limitations of realising them by the local and national governments. During firework, the author encountered dwellers outside four studied low-income neighbourhoods in the south region of Montenegro. Mapping morphological elements of these generally small clusters of informal built units are left for future research. Future studies could examine how informality is performed in Montenegro by moderate and high-income groups as an assemblage of different power relationships and urban practices.

The argument is based on counter urbanism as the orientation and destination of less visible neighbourhoods for creating building regulations embedded in social forces and cultural habits of all social and ethnic groups. This study showed that the urban morphology of informality in the coastal cities of Montenegro lays the ground for alternative urban planning practices based on the different interconnection of districts. The outcome is a strong link between different social and ethical groups through self-building practices.

In coastal cities of Montenegro, Roma, Ashkali, and Egyptian live with other low-income groups in unsanitary settlements characterised by poor living conditions, low-quality illegally built housing, no plumbing or sewage systems, and overcrowded urban areas. Mapping morphological elements of less visible urban areas propose shifting from top-down urban planning policies to a participatory model of developing urban areas.

The assemblage of informally built urban areas legitimise place in the city that goes against the housing market's dominant logic and exceeds alternative logics of building production. This article outlined the urban morphologies of four urban areas for turning the image of informality away from decline and despair to lessons of urban interconnection. By creating different maps, the author presented a diverse orientation of four case studies based on density, accessibility, and operating assortment.