Park Quality and Road Walkability in Greater Noida, India: A Case Study Demonstrating GIS for Assessing Barriers to Being Physically Active in Urban Areas
In urbanizing India, walkability and outdoor physical activities are essential for a healthy lifestyle. Urban roads need to be assessed for walkability, and public parks need to be assessed as spaces for physical activities. Not many studies have looked at both the aspects together, and use of GIS is not prevalent. This study demonstrates use of GIS to examine various parameters of walkability and parks in the city of Greater Noida, India. GIS was found highly effective for collecting information before performing survey of selected sectors, post-field data visualization, and data integration to understand spatial variability of walkability and usefulness of individual parks. Only one of the sectors was identified as having better walkability as well as good quality of parks for physical activities. Many low-income sectors did not have parks. Walkability parameters had a spatial pattern within each sector, and urban and rural sectors differed in providing walkability.