Institute For The Future

Understanding Fitness Deserts

 

A couple months ago, Good had a great feature about the idea of a fitness desert--essentially, a place where, due to some combination of environmental and social factors, getting out, walking around, and exercising is unusually difficult. As far as I can tell, the piece, by Alex Schmidt, is one of the first to use the term fitness desert--and I'd guess, in part, this is because coming up with any sort of clear definition of one is complex. In theory, the presence or absence of sidewalks, bike paths, parks, and gyms could all contribute to a definition, as could factors like crime rates.

 

Schmidt notes some of these competing definitions in her article:

 

 

Like food deserts—areas where residents don’t have reliable access to fresh food—fitness deserts pose health challenges to millions of Americans, mostly low-income ones. A full 80 percent of census blocks do not have a park within a half-mile, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report released last year. Studies have shown that these disparities exist in cities all over the country, including Chicago, San Francisco and Washington D.C., complicating efforts to fight obesity in poor communities.

 

David Sloan, a professor of urban planning at the University of Southern California, says the difference in fitness opportunities between affluent and low-income areas are stark. While wealthy West Los Angeles has 70.1 acres of recreation or green space per 1,000 people, low-income South Los Angeles has 1.2 acres per 1,000. Meanwhile, private gyms are much more common in the more affluent areas. The recession has made it even more difficult to rely on public parks for fitness and recreation, as public resources earmarked for those spaces dwindle.

 

 

 

 

In other words, there are a couple of key points: We know that areas where it's hard to exercise are bad for health; we also know that actually defining "hard to exercise" is, itself, no easy task at the moment.

 

But over the next decade, I think we'll have increasingly good tools to define complex and significant determinants of health--like fitness deserts. Already, relatively straightforward services like walk score offer some insight into how easy or hard it is to navigate a neighborhood--and layering that information with other environmental and social data is pretty feasible. It will, for example, be possible to start to answer questions like how the location of a park, or the presence of a gym, impacts exercise rates.

 

One of the real opportunities to use information to enhance health over the next decade will be to link these sorts of environmental definitions to health outcomes and behaviors to better understand the kinds of environments that impact health--and to develop some more targeted ways to use the environment to enhance health.

 

Put differently, despite long-standing links between health and place, one of the challenges to intervening through the environment is in identifying interventions that genuinely work--a challenge that may dissipate as we develop high-resolution tools to analyze and understand links between place and health.