Association between Objectively Measured Neighbourhood Built Environment and Walkability

Some previous studies show that the majority of the urban planners and urban designers uses subjective measures to assess built environment attributes and neighbourhood walkability in Malaysia. However, those were using objective measures just evaluating one or two attributes of the built environment. Hence this paper focuses on objective measures of several built environment attributes that influence walkability. The paper links various objective measures of attributes of the built environment that influence walkability with objectively measured walkability. For this study data was obtained from Putrajaya review of the master plan and geographical information system data and walking distance obtained from the pedometer. The pedometers were deployed for 7-days period to capture an objective level of walkability. To achieve this study objective, a case study was conducted on three different residential precincts of Putrajaya, Malaysia and a randomly selected sample of 134 respondents from each of these three precincts was collected. To measure built environment attributes objectively, indices were used for quantifying compactness, diversity, accessibility and connectivity. The results indicate that overall indices values of Precinct 18 are high compared to precinct 9 and 8. The daily distance measured by pedometer is also high for Precinct 18. Findings of this study recommend that it is practicable for the urban designers and urban planners to employ these two objective methods. As in this study built environment index results correspond with pedometer recorded distance hence it is concluded that GIS data also has the potential to be used to construct measures of built environment attributes and to develop indices of walkability on neighbourhood scale both in Malaysia as well as in Pakistan.