This report in New Urban News may be more proof of the self-evident, but it certainly reinforces the work Larry Frank is doing at UBC:
“People who live in ‘walkable’ neighbourhoods are more involved in their communities, more trusting and have a higher quality of life, a new study suggests.
“The researchers found that walkable neighbourhoods scored higher on every measure of social capital than less walkable neighbourhoods.”
An abstract of the paper can be found in the journal Applied Research in Quality of Life, available here.
I think we have to be somewhat careful about the claims we make about how the environment can shape us for the better. Somehow all the wonderful urban texture, human scale walkability, and just general beauty of Munich, Nuremburg and thousands of fabulous urban places all over Germany in the 1930’s didn’t undermine a whole host of deep seated prejudices, paranoias, and general mistrust of others, nor limit the formation of social capital only to the good kind.
I guess, but do we have to jump to the Godwin argument in the first post?
Of course the environment can shape us for the better, and for the worse. But if you take a country that is overall devastated by wars, debt, foreign payments, coup attempts, hyper-inflation, an economic depression, racial hatred and stir it all together with a street army run by a megalamaniac beating up their opposition, then those areas that are in walkable neighbourhoods will still likely outperform those areas that aren’t in the so-called “social capital.” That’s what the research tells us.
It works because we’re comparing two cities with otherwise comparable environments, not Fascist Germany with modern America (as much as people seem to love to make the comparison…).