Thinking relationally about built environments and walkability: A study of adult walking behavior in Waterloo, Ontario
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The majority of research on built form and walking has been approached from a deterministic perspective and does not address the theoretical underpinnings of individual walking behaviour. This paper interrogates the relationship between individual walkers and their local environment in order to illuminate how and why people walk through/with space. Specifically, the paper reports on findings from 20 adult participants in Waterloo, Canada who took part in a participatory walking interview accompanied by a member of the research team. A relational interpretation of the data revealed that the relationship between built form and walking extends beyond the correlates of residential density, mix of land uses and street networks. Our findings reveal that there are blurred boundaries between utilitarian and recreational walking behavior, and that walking decisions were influenced by desires to avoid discomfort, seek pleasure, foster social connection and more-than-human encounters. We conclude with the argument that a relational perspective better captures the dynamics between people and place, and ultimately guides practitioners to design built environments that accommodate the realities of human activity in general and walking behavior in particular.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".