Federico Andrade Rivas: Do you live in a playable neighbourhood? A new national level metric aims to answer this question

Gabriela Rocha Sales — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 20:56:54 +0000

Federico Andrade Rivas: Do you live in a playable neighbourhood? A new national level metric aims to answer this question Gabriela Rocha Sales Mon, 04/27/2026 - 14:56

Beyond the established benefits of physical activity on human health, there is increasing evidence showing the importance of outdoor free play for young children’s current and long-term physical, cognitive, and social-emotional development. Geography Assistant Professor Federico Andrade Rivas joined a research collaboration led by Dr. Emily Gemmell (University of British Columbia) to develop Canada’s first nationwide “playability index” to assess how urban environments support young children’s outdoor free play.

Children are increasingly growing up in car-centric cities with limited access to spaces that promote free play. This is concerning, as most of their physical activity is a by-product of play. Moreover, research and policy often focus on adults’ behaviours and mobility patterns when assessing how built environments influence human health. Thus, current solutions to improve physical activity and well-being through urban interventions often assume that children will benefit from designs and metrics tailored to adults’ mobility and behaviour. Adults often assume that outdoor playtime is limited to playgrounds and parks, whereas children view almost any space as potentially playable. In order to contribute to filling up these gaps in research and policy, the team developed Playscore. This effort led to a publication in the journal Cities and Canada national level media coverage.

The playability index was built from an evidence-based framework for neighbourhood playability among children developed by the team. This framework identified five major domains influencing outdoor free play: spaces for play, social, traffic/pedestrian and natural environments, and child-relevant destinations. The team approach to build the index consisted of four steps: selection of indicators to operationalize distinct concepts within these domains, a survey of experts to inform the weighting of metric components and obtain feedback on indicator selection and finally, weighting and aggregation of indicators and domains into a composite metric.

Importantly, the analysis of the playscore results showed that average scores did not vary much across the 35 Canadian cities included in the study. However, there is wide variation in neighbourhood playability within the same city, which ranges from 52-77%. The team also found that 39% of children lived in areas where at least one key factor, like safe streets or access to nature, scored in the bottom 10% for all neighbourhoods in the city. Moreover, for a majority of cities, materially disadvantaged neighbourhoods had lower playability scores, leading to health equity and environmental justice issues. Even within the same city, children experience vast difference in access to environments that support outdoor play and physical, cognitive, and social-emotional well-being.

The potential application of the playability index operates at multiple scales. It enables small area-level assessment of supportiveness, barriers and facilitators to young children's outdoor play, while proposes a theoretical framework and methodological approach that may be adapted to develop indices of playability across diverse urban contexts. This work highlights the importance of research that can inform interventions at the local and regional level, while promoting the creation of similar tools in other urban contexts like the US. In addition, it contributes to shape the public discourse on who and what matters when we evaluate and design our cities.

Figure from the published article (Gemmell et al. 2026; Cities). Distribution of playability and domain score deciles for postal codes within the Toronto metropolitan area. Playability score with alternate measure of social environment.

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Federico Andrade Rivas Joins the Geography Department as Assistant Professor

Gabriela Rocha Sales — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 20:54:51 +0000

Federico Andrade Rivas Joins the Geography Department as Assistant Professor Gabriela Rocha Sales Mon, 12/08/2025 - 13:54

My path to becoming an Assistant Professor at the Geography department started in Colombia, where I studied environmental engineering and anthropology. After working in a malaria surveillance and climate change adaptation project with nomadic Indigenous populations in the Amazon, I realized that my passion was to understand the complex determinants of human health disparities. Thus, I decided to pursue a Master of Public Health at the University of Cape Town, excited to learn from “South-South” collaborations on chemical contamination issues. The drive to understand human health as deeply intertwined with the natural environment led me to join emergent approaches to human health, such as planetary health, and to pursue a PhD at the University of British Columbia. In Canada, I had the privilege to collaborate in “North-South” partnerships on pollution and globalized food systems, as well as work in solidarity with First Nations and Inuit on the nutritional benefits and contamination issues of traditional food systems.

Currently, my scholarship sits at the intersection of human well-being and the integrity of ecosystems that support life on Earth. I focus on applying a creative combination of geospatial, quantitative, and qualitative research methods to assess contamination issues at global, national, and local scales. I do this while elucidating connections between pollution threats to other planetary health challenges and drivers of health disparities, such as environmental change. I strive to conduct relevant and meaningful research that is genuinely interdisciplinary, collaborative, and focused on solutions and communities’ aspirations beyond solely evaluating damage.

When I am not conducting research or teaching, you can find me rock climbing, brewing coffee, or sharing time with my family.

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Federico Andrade-Rivas

Federico Andrade Rivas: Do you live in a playable neighbourhood? A new national level metric aims to answer this question

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Federico Andrade Rivas Joins the Geography Department as Assistant Professor

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