Design
Declining Walkability Plays a Big Role in China's Obesity Problem
But it's the middle class, not the poor who may pay the biggest price.
In China’s rapidly changing urban landscape, the Chinese middle class may be bearing the greatest burden when it comes to the connection between the way their cities are being built and rates of obesity, a new study suggests.
A paper recently published in the journal Preventive Medicine examines the connections between obesity, income, and the built environment in two of China’s major cities, Shanghai and Hangzhou. The research team is headed up by Mariela Alfonzo, an assistant research professor at the NYU School of Engineering and a Fulbright scholar who has spent years developing measures of walkability in the United States and is now expanding that work to China.