Reinterpreting Fitness Running: A topological study for healthy cities

The lack of everyday activity is a growing societal problem. Urban planning plays an important role in  this: we need more environments that facilitates and inspires to an active life. Jogging is one of the most common types of physical activities and Sweden has got a long going tradition of planning for running tracks. But these have, since the late 5O's, been located in parks and forests at the urban fringe. With growing cities and an increasingly inactive population there is a need to update the more than SO year old model. Within this project we have been aiming for a deeper understanding of how we through planning and design of the physical environment can create better conditions for increased wellbeing. Seminars that gathered researchers and the project's partners (the Municipalities of Halmstad, Helsingborg, Malmo and Lund) to enable mutual learning has been an important part of the project. How can we plan for urban running tracks so that these places attract more people to become active and are perceived as accessible to everyone? has been the project's main research question. It has been answered through literature studies, evaluation of existing facilities focusing on method development and through the exchange of knowledge between practitioners and researchers.

The main contribution of the project is the mutual learning between the project's partner municipalities and researchers as well as the method development especially regarding approaches to planning for physical activity in the urban landscape at different levels of scale.