Indicators for Community Action: Built Environment and Community Health

Abstract

Recently a collaborative project between a university, a provincial statistical agency, and a non-profit service organization worked to identify built environment indicators for local action and planning around community health. The research involved developing appropriate built environment indicators for active recreation and transportation, and testing them for community usefulness and data availability in several communities in Nova Scotia, Canada. The indicators will be added to an online community database managed by the provincial government. By making province-wide indicator data easily and publicly available, governments have the potential to facilitate local initiatives to improve community health and well-being. In this paper we describe the process of identifying indicators that would let communities identify whether their built environment promotes active recreation and active transportation.