Data use in urban walkability promotion: A case study from Tampere

Due to its societal benefits, walking promotion has become a prevalent policy goal in contemporary cities. As a result, the concept of walkability, which broadly refers to how pedestrian-friendly the built environment is, has attracted interest among academics and practitioners seeking to better understand and promote walking behavior. At the same time, advances in technology and citizen engagement are making a wider range of data available to practitioners to inform walkability-related policymaking. However, there is a dearth of understanding of how practitioners use data to inform walkability-related policies. To address this shortcoming, we conducted a case study in the Finnish city of Tampere, which has recently invested significantly in data use and published a concrete plan to promote walking, with the aim of understanding which types of data civil servants use to improve walkability and how different data are utilized. Drawing on document analysis and interviews with civil servants, our findings show that data are primarily used to manage trade-offs in public space and resource allocation, with walking-behavior data being central to justifying investments and designing infrastructure. The results reveal a misalignment between academic research on walkability, which focuses on quantifying the physical dimension of the built environment, and policy practice, which, based on our results, emphasizes the behavioral and perceptual dimensions of walkability.