Healthy Lifestyles to Boost Sustainable Growth (STYLE) (STYLE)

The research was funded by Strategic Research Council at the Research Council of Finland.

Main funder

Research Council of Finland

Funder's project number: 346611

Funds granted by main funder (€)

227 951,00

Funding program

Strategic research programmes, AoF (Research Council of Finland)

Project timetable

Project start date: 01/01/2022

Project end date: 31/12/2023

Summary

The STYLE project boosts sustainable economic growth by enhancing everyday physical activity in a way that increases the share of daily bicycling, walking and other modes of active transport. It combines viewpoints from research on public health with transport, marketing, sustainable urban planning and futures studies. Currently daily physical activity recommendations are met with only a third of children and adolescents and one fifth of adult population, but recent analyses show that increasing walking by 20% would generate health benefits worth 4 billion € in Finland. The costs caused by insufficient physical activity have been estimated to reach 3.2-7.5 billion € depending on the assumptions of the calculations. In addition, the economic branch around physical activity, the ‘sports cluster’, has grown rapidly in Finland and is estimated to total 5.5 billion €. According to recent opinion surveys there is considerable latent demand of increased modes of active transport and the hegemonic position of the passenger car seems to be deceasing. Furthermore, transport is increasingly understood as mobility as a service (MaaS). How can these rising trends be harnessed to ensure that a sustainable change in transport modal split would take place? According to our working hypothesis the preferred change requires changes in lifestyles, which is conceptualised under the heading ‘lifestyles of health and sustainability’ (LOHAS). We explore the hypothesis through health promotion and mobility management interventions that are co-designed together with four cities – Helsinki, Tampere, Turku and Jyväskylä. The effects of both social and infrastructural interventions will be objectively measured with accelerometers. In the STYLE project we will combine hard quantitative facts with heuristic visioning of the future and move on to implement the visions into action and even measure their fulfilment. In addition, emotional aspects inherent in consumer behaviour change are of special concern, as well as national scenarios of lifestyles combining active transport and physical activity in various generational age cohorts. The interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary combination of the approaches and methods integrated in STYLE is internationally unique in both transport and physical activity studies.