Urban settings and opportunities for healthy lifestyles: rediscovering walking and cycling and understanding their health benefits

Urban settings play a major role in facilitating and enabling healthy lifestyle choices. In particular, they can provide opportunities for maintaining or reintroducing walking and cycling as part of daily life, contributing to more physically active lifestyles and reducing obesity and risks for important diseases such as coronary heart disease, hypertension, and diabetes. This paper describes analytical tools that can be used locally to support walking and cycling as cost-effective and healthy options for urban mobility. The paper highlights recent international policy developments that are raising awareness of health promoting opportunities provided by walking and cycling, and the role to be played by urban and transport planning in creating favourable conditions for safe walking and cycling.