Category Archives: Urban planning/land-use policies
Public Health Law Research: Zoning for Walkability
Municipal mixed-use zoning is a public health strategy to create more walkable neighborhoods by creating integrated, un-siloed access to daily activities—such as going grocery shopping and traveling to school and work. A recent study in a special issue of the Journal of Health, Politics, Policy and Law funded by Public Health Law Research, a program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, evaluated municipal zoning ordinances in 22 California cities to see whether the ordinances improved walkability in those communities. NewPublicHealth spoke with the study’s two authors, Sue Thomas, PhD, senior research scientist at the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation-Santa Cruz (PIRE) and Carol Cannon, PhD, formerly with PIRE and current associate research scientist at the CDM Group, Inc, a consulting firm in Bethesda, Md.
>>Read the full study.
NewPublicHealth: What was the scope of your study?
Carol Cannon: We looked at ordinances that create municipal mixed use zoning, and whether these laws seem to have an impact on the potential for walking to destinations.
NPH: In what ways were the study and findings innovative?
New Partners for Smart Growth Q&A: Paul Zykofsky
Paul Zykofsky, Local Government Commission, leading a walkability audit in Baldwin Park, Calif.
NewPublicHealth is in Kansas City this week for the 2013 New Partners for Smart Growth conference, which brings together partners for smart and sustainable living from across diverse sectors. Over 1,000 attendees are expected including elected officials, government agency leaders, developers, builders, bankers, realtors, and advocates and professionals in planning, transportation, public health, landscape architecture, architecture, housing, parks and recreation, public works, crime prevention, education and the environment.
Just what is smart growth? “Smart growth means building urban, suburban and rural communities with housing and transportation choices near jobs, shops and schools. This approach supports local economies and protects the environment,” according to Smart Growth America.
Ahead of the conference, NewPublicHealth spoke with Paul Zykofsky, associate executive director at the Local Government Commission, which assists local governments in establishing and developing the key elements of livable communities, and organizes the conference. He will be leading a session at the meeting called Smart Growth 101.
NewPublicHealth: What is Smart Growth 101?
Designing Healthy Communities: NewPublicHealth Q&A with Richard Jackson
Dr. Richard Jackson, "Designing Healthy Communities"
"Designing Healthy Communities,” a four-part series funded in part by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, debuts this month and next on many Public Broadcasting stations. The program looks at the impact the built environment has on key public health problems such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease, asthma, cancer and depression. In the series, host Richard Jackson, MD, MPH, professor and chair of environmental health science at the UCLA School of Public Health, connects bad community design with burgeoning health costs, then analyzes and illustrates what citizens are doing about this crisis by looking upstream for innovative solutions.
NewPublicHealth recently caught up with Dr. Jackson, who will also be a featured speaker at the New Partners for Smart Growth Conference in San Diego next week, leading a session on “Health as a Messaging Tool.” Dr. Jackson received the New Partners for Smart Growth Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008.
Follow NewPublicHealth coverage on-site at the Smart Growth conference here and on twitter @RWJF_PubHealth.
NewPublicHealth: What prompted the "Designing Healthy Communities" series?
Dr. Jackson: My background is that I’ve worked in environmental health in one form or another for over 30 years. I started out as a pediatrician and have become more and more focused on the whole mix of environment and health and the outcomes and the impacts on our population, acute impacts such as asthma, car injuries, all the way through to chronic diseases, cancer and birth defects, and I’ve investigated all of them. And then beyond chronic diseases, long-term health impacts such as endocrine disrupters in the environment and health effects of global climate change.
I spent nine years as the Director for the National Center for Environmental Health and I was State Health Officer for California for a year and a half, and I’ve become increasingly convinced that I’m sitting at the end of the disease pipeline waiting for somebody to come in the door with obesity-related diabetes, with injuries related to a bad urban design or for that matter a lack of adequate crosswalks. Asthma and even heart disease are related to very poor air quality. That it is not feasible for the future of our country. When I was a young doctor, seven percent of all the money in the United States that was going to medical care. It’s now more than 17 percent, and the U.S. is still ranked about number 50 in life expectancies worldwide.
So, we’re not doing something right, and I would assert that what we’re not doing right is we’re failing to really operate in the realm of prevention. We’re not going far enough upstream in thinking about what things are affecting our health. What I would assert is a big driver that’s affecting our health but it’s also affecting our happiness, our prosperity, and our future is how we have built America. We have built it for the needs of cars and other short-term needs, maximizing sale of commodity foods of various kinds and we have not built it with an eye towards people and an eye towards future generations.
I co-wrote a book ten years ago called “Urban Sprawl and Public Health,” and then became much more focused on these issues of built environment and co-wrote a textbook, where we very deeply document the impact of the built environment on everything that you would imagine, but also further upstream to obesity and lack of fitness, and even further upstream to unhappiness, to depression, and we began to think that just as this damaged environment can have multiple negative health outcomes, creating health environments should have positive health outcomes. And that’s why the television series is called “Designing Healthy Communities."
Ten years ago there really was very little recognition of this issue, but that’s changing. There were almost 300 sessions that either had the words “built environment” or “land use” at the last American Public Health Association National Meeting in early November in Washington, DC.
NPH: What’s driving that increasing interest?
City Planning and Health: Q&A With Harriet Tregoning, D.C. Office of City Planning
Harriet Tregoning, Director of the D.C. Office of City Planning
Tomorrow, Leadership for Healthy Communities will be hosting a webinar called Making the Connection: Linking Economic Growth to Policies to Prevent Childhood Obesity. The webinar will highlight the important links between economic growth and public health, and look at ways to implement policies that improve both. In advance of the webinar, NewPublicHealth spoke with Harriet Tregoning, Director of the Washington D.C. Office of City Planning , about efforts to make the district "a walkable, bikeable, eminently livable, globally competitive and sustainable city."
NewPublicHealth: How did city planners come to view health as part of their mission, and why is that important?
Harriet Tregoning: City planners increasingly take a broad view of their purview. So it’s not just the physical layout of the city, but also what kind of results for cities and their residents do plans produce. It’s clear that obesity is a growing epidemic, and for municipalities, in most cases, one of the most quickly rising costs is health care. So figuring out how to plan cities for the best health outcomes is on the agenda of most city planners.
NPH: What city planning activities are now underway in Washington, D.C., that address childhood obesity prevention?
