Empowering Rural Communities to Measure Walkability: Co-Development of a Digital Tool

Local neighbourhood environments are important for shaping walkability, but few instruments exist to assess walkability in rural areas. Furthermore, there are no existing tools that have been designed with and for communities to collect local data on walkability, which has the potential to empower communities with ownership and knowledge of the resulting information.

This paper aimed to describe the development and evaluation of a digital tool designed to measure walkability in rural areas.

The Communities for Walkability (C4W) digital tool was co-developed by researchers and community members. Sixty-one community members in 10 small rural Tasmanian towns conducted 80 street segment audits and/or participated in workshops; 16 participants engaged in semi-structured interviews. Geospatial assessments of walkability were completed using Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Qualitative data were content/thematically analysed and quantitative data analysed descriptively. Exploratory analysis was performed to assess correlations between geospatially assessed walkability and a range of audit scores.

It was feasible for citizen scientists to collect data using the largely acceptable digital tool, with some areas for improvement identified, particularly the conflict between the sequential nature of tool items and the non-sequential nature of attributes encountered during data collection, the inability to review/save findings, and technical difficulties uploading photographs. Exploratory analysis revealed some correlations between geospatially assessed walkability and safety, commercial land use, and perceived overall walkability; however, the small sample size and exploratory nature of analyses suggest cautious interpretation.

Although feasible and acceptable for rural communities to collect walkability data using a citizen science approach, future digital walkability tools should allow greater flexibility for real-time data collection, provide streamlined systems for uploading photographs, and include review and save features. The inclusion of citizen perspectives in the design and collection of local data has the potential to be a powerful mechanism to support communities and stakeholders to engage in collective efforts and create environments that support walkability.

Members of the public were involved in this study in four key ways: co-development of the digital walkability tool, data collection using the digital walkability tool, sense-making and interpretation of findings from the digital walkability tool, and through interviews providing feedback on the tool.