This recent article by Amanda Mull makes an interesting argument about "Why Americans Really Go to the Gym." In it she argues that gyms aren't just about being healthy and looking beautiful. Part of the satisfaction of working out in a collective space is that, among other things, you get to be around people with similar values and you get to prove to others that you are someone with enough self-discipline to stay consistently active. In her words, "proving something to others is often a big part of proving it to yourself, and that's difficult to do when no one else can see you." Depending on how you interpret this, it might lead you to believe that we're all looking for a bit of validation from others. But I think the other way to look at it is that spaces such as gyms and offices aren't just empty vessels where we come to do our necessary work. They are also social environments that serve some potentially important psychological functions.

The other thing Mull's article touches on is the evolution of physical activity:

In the past 70 years, physical activity in America has transformed from a necessity of daily life into an often-expensive leisure activity, retrofitted into the foundation of people’s identities. As a concept, fitness was a response to the flourishing, sidewalk-free postwar American suburbs and what the fitness pioneer Bonnie Prudden dubbed “the tyranny of the wheel”: Americans went from strollers to school buses to cars, stripping out much of the on-foot transportation that had long characterized life in cities or on farms. “In the ’50s and ’60s, the body became a problem, and exercise developed—it had to develop—because people realized that we were all going to die of heart attacks,” Shelly McKenzie, the author of Getting Physical: The Rise of Fitness Culture in America, told me.

In short: we had no choice but to create a fitness industry because we systematically removed physical activity from our daily lives. You could argue -- as the above excerpt does -- that this was largely because of suburbanization and changes in mobility. But I don't think that's everything. We also changed the kind of work that a lot of us do and created technologies that allow us to do more without, frankly, moving all that much. Today, doing good work and being productive is often characterized by sitting still for extended periods of time and subsisting on empty calories so that you don't have to lose focus for very long. Indeed, working out our bodies, and consequently our minds, has become somewhat of a luxury.

“We shape the cities, and then our cities shape us.” That’s one of my favorite lines from the documentary The Human Scale, featuring Danish architect and urban designer Jan Gehl. I like it because I don’t think many of us think enough about the way in which the built environment – that we create – ultimately goes on to influence the way we live our lives.

One of the most interesting connections for me is the link between urban form and public health. There’s been a lot of talk over the years about how suburban sprawl is, or might be, making us fat (among other things). We’ve created environments that are only navigable by cars and that has forced many of us into sedentary lifestyles. We sit in our cars, and then we sit in our offices.

So today I’d like to conduct a bit of a poll. If you’d like to participate, please share the following 3 things in the comment section below: 1) your city, 2) the type of neighborhood you live in (urban, suburban, rural, etc.), and 3) the amount of time you spend walking or doing something active on an average day.

Here’s me:

I live downtown Toronto in the St. Lawrence Market neighborhood (urban). I take the subway to work and the station is a 10 minute walk from my place. So as a bare minimum, I spend at least 20 minutes a day walking. But since I also walk to do most of my regular errands, and since my gym is another 10 minute walk from my place, I’d say I average a good 30-45 minutes of walking each day.

Now it’s your turn :)

This is a pretty crude survey, but with the advent of things like smartwatches and health monitors, I think we’ll soon have lots of great data on the ways in which our cities might shape our health.

Image: The Economist