Active Design is about creating environments that help people lead more physically active and healthy lives.
‘Active environments’ encourage people to be active throughout their everyday lives – and support their health and wellbeing.
Active design is not just focused on delivering opportunities for sport and formal exercise – the principles encourage all types of physical activity which could include active travel, play, outdoor leisure or anything where people can be active in addition to sport and exercise. All environments should support physical activity equitably across all ages, ethnicities, genders and abilities – enabling everyone to be active and build long-term active habits and behaviours.
Where we live, work, travel and play has a major role in shaping our activity choices and by providing opportunities for physical activity active environments can help to improve physical and mental health.
What we do
We have an advocacy role to promote active design to create active environments. This can be through encouraging the principles of active design being adopted into policy and also being implemented.
We want organisations and partners to consider active design as the first choice to create active environments.
Planning Policy
There is an opportunity to create places and spaces for people to be active through new and redevelopment proposals.
Our work in this area includes ensuring that planning policies contain requirements to provide for opportunities to improve health and wellbeing through physical activity.
We advocate for planning policies through Local Authority Local Plans to include the requirements for opportunities to be physically active through development proposals.
This has included raising the awareness of Sport England Active Design and seeking to get this document referenced in local planning policy. We have also been working to encourage the Local Plan to reference the Council’s Physical Activity Strategy and vice versa.
We have further been collaborating with Local Authorities around Health Impact Assessments (HIAs) and the requirement for these as part of the planning process.
This includes ensuring that developers submit HIAs with their planning applications and how the Local Authorities assess the submitted HIAs.