The suburbs are often thought of as a safer place to raise healthy children.
There are often not a lot of things to see and do in these places.- Larisa Lotoski
But Larisa Lotoski, a PhD student at the University of Saskatchewan, is challenging those beliefs with an award-winning study examining "how our neighbourhoods can shape how active we are in our everyday lives."
"A lot of people, including kids, are spending way more time indoors," she said.
That may not come as a huge shock in this digital era, as people are spend more and more time on screens doing things like playing games and communicating with friends on social media platforms.
The big takeaway from the study is that children in the suburbs are less active than their urban neighbours.
The work earned Lotoski an award from the Canadian Public Health Association.
How the study was conducted
For a year, Lotoski outfitted 800 children aged nine to 14 with fitness trackers and GPS to find out what they were up to in their leisure time.
The suburbs offer bigger yards, parks and bike paths, but Lotoski found that sprawl in newer neighbourhoods can keep children at home.
"There are often not a lot of things to see and do in these places," she said in an interview withCBC Radio's Saskatoon Morning.
That's not the case for urban kids, according to Lotoski. She offered the example of children who live in places like Nutana in Saskatoon, with the trendy Broadway shopping district at its heart.
"They are free to go, they can walk a couple of blocks, find a park, find a place to pick up some snacks with friends, and then head back home."
Lotoski said this work is just a beginning and she hopes to keep doing research to help shape cities, so that decision makers will support policies to keep urban neighbourhoods interesting and change the way they plan new areas to make them "not as sprawled out and far away from amenities so we can all have an equal opportunity."