How to promote active urban environments and increase population physical activity levels?
Our main role in SPAcE – Supporting Policy and Action for Active Environments has been to lead the development of the UActivE Action Plan for the city of Palermo in order to address low levels of physical activity in the community and promote physical activity-friendly environments.
Using a co-productive model, we collaborated with local communities as well as local government together with school teachers, students, mobility associations and architects.
The Action Plan focuses on addressing child overweight and obesity levels through the development of programmes to increase physical activity in and out of school.
The two main goals of the Plan have been developed:
- A School Urban Trails Programme – Urban trekking from home to school to playground that encourages children to walk and cycle to school and areas of play with the use of Walking Guides, mobile app and incorporating historical monuments of the city within the urban trails;
- an Active School Districts programme that aims to make use of school recreational facilities during after school hours and improving the facilities offered by school buildings for maintaining a physical active friendly environment within local communities.
The final launch event in Italy for the SPAcE project took place on 20th December 2017 at Moltivolti, a multicultural centre in Palermo.
We organised a meeting with the students and teachers of “Benedetto Croce” Lyceum that developed a collection of urban trails from home to school during the last months to support the Plans implementation and sustainability.
During the event, not only did we present the work done by the students in the classroom in developing their own School Urban Trails Programme, but we also presented the final three outputs of the project to the students, teachers and members of the Working Group that have helped to develop the Plan along with key stakeholders in school education and sustainable mobility.
You can now read the final UActivE Plan for the city of Palermo developed by CESIE, Palermo – home of active and healthy school communities here.
The final UActivE Action Plans developed for Trikala (Greece), Castilla-La Mancha (Spain), Brasov (Romania) and Tukums (Latvia), are now available on the SPAcE project website together with the final 3 outputs of the project:
- Supporting Policy and Action for Active Environments – Environments for physical activity in Europe a review of evidence and examples of practice
- How to create an Urban Active Environment (UActivE) Action Plan – Lessons learnt and case studies from five European cities from the SPAcE EU project
- Measuring the value of an Urban Active Environment, using the WHO Health Economic Assessment Tool (HEAT)0
The SPAcE project is funded by Erasmus+ Sport: Support to Collaborative Partnerships programme aims to integrate active transport programmes (i.e. walking to school, cycle to work schemes etc.) into public policy across the European Union. The overall aim of the SPAcE project is to make the healthy choice the easy choice through creating sustainable urban active environments in cities and towns across the European Union.
The project partnership holds together 10 organisations:
- University of Gloucestershire (United Kingdom, coordinator);
- University of Oxford (United Kingdom);
- University of Thessaly(Greece);
- University of Zurich (Switzerland);
- Fit for Life Program – LIKES Foundation for Sport and Health Science (Finland);
- Castilla La Mancha Regional Government of Education (Spain);
- Tukums Municipality(Latvia);
- Brasov Metropolitan Agency (Romania);
- Municipality of Trikala(Greece);
- CESIE (Italy).
For more information about the work to develop the UACtivE Action Plan in Palermo please contact: rosina.ndukwe@cesie.org.
