2014 Chester Rapkin Award for Best Planning Paper in Volume 34: Walking to School: The Experience of Children in Inner City Los Angeles and Implications for Policy

Active living is about promoting walking, and the presumption is that attractive, appealing, and safe streets will induce more walking. This has led to a significant amount of research on developing audit tools for the built environment, and even quantifying "urban design" so that the right mix of urban design interventions at the street and neighborhood level will lead to a higher rate of walking. Sharing similar predilection for the built environment--that it matters in improving the quality of life experience--some were nevertheless taken aback by the children's report of their everyday street-level experience of inner city neighborhoods, and walking to school in particular. Here, Banerjee et al discuss the experience of children in inner city Los Angeles and implication for policy.