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Free Resources | Land Use | Articles |
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Development and Public Health: Could our development patterns be affecting our personal health? Cont… The Riverwalk introduced healthy new walking options for downtown workers. It also does a better job of connecting downtown’s restaurants, apartments, stores, and offices. New river views inspired building owners and developers to transform empty buildings into condominiums with dining on the first floor, making the riverside a destination. Rowers travel the river, attracted by the audience of walkers and diners who cheer them on. The River-walk connects downtown to nature: trout, steelhead, and salmon have added the fishing crowd to the downtown mix.
"To solve the problem of getting people walking and bicycling again would require collaboration at all levels," notes Harriet Tregoning, Maryland’s secretary of planning. Transportation engineers would need to de-liver safe, inviting ways to get around on foot. Land use planners would have to give people something to walk to, mixing uses to bring homes and shopping, schools, and jobs closer together. Public safety officials would need to make places feel safer, with better lighting and more enforcement of traffic laws, explains Tregoning. Urban designers would have to make places attractive, paying attention to wall heights, storefronts, and street buffers. The benefits would accrue to more than just pedestrians. Economic development experts will find that people making routine errands become new customers for local businesses. Community policing organizations already know that more people on the street make places more inviting for visitors and less attractive for criminals. Use of public transit would increase as pedestrians learn that the easiest way to increase the range of their legs is by riding a bus or train, notes Tregoning. But the most immediate and important benefit would be to the health, both physical and mental, of many more people. For children, who have become increasingly sedentary and over-weight, the opportunity to walk to school or a friend’s house could make a dramatic difference in their health and ability to concentrate in class. Events and programs such as National Walk to School Day and the recent Safe Routes to School legislation passed in California are important components in the livability of communities. As Peter Calthorpe has said, "Every project has a political, economic, ecological, social, technical, aesthetic, and ideological dimension." Health is an embedded characteristic within those dimensions; it is important that it is reflected in the planning and development process to improve the livability of communities. Many professionals believe it is impossible to solve development problems because people are not naturally inclined to accept new practices. A growing belief, however, is that this reluctance exists because people continue to op-erate within the constraints of their respective disciplines and fail to recognize the potential success of multidisciplinary collaboration. Pro-fessionals from a variety of fields need to recognize their role in the larger scheme of public health and understand that their practices can affect the behavior and health of everyone. The planner, developer, architect, engineer, and public health practitioner should work collaboratively to identify the effects of their decisions and develop healthier communities. Ultimately, people strive to leave a legacy that affects future generations. As the 21st century continues, the choice is to create places that can improve the quality of life, or to continue along the same path and suffer the economic and medical consequences of the nation’s practices. RICHARD E. KILLINGSWORTH is a health scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. JEAN LAMMING is project manager of health and land use pro-grams at the nonprofit Local Government Com-mission in Sacramento, California. Reid Ewing, Harriet Tregoning, Michael Replogle, Jonathan Rose, and John Norquist contributed to this article.
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The
public walkway has been extended a mile north from downtown, and
construction starts soon on an extension a mile south to Lake Michigan.
Real estate values have skyrocketed as people reconnect with a river
that had been ignored for a century. This is a time when cities
spend hundreds of millions of dollars on convention or sports centers,
desperately seeking the biggest complex, although almost all such
facilities lose money. Many such projects are built in isolation
from their surroundings. "Alas, we’ve made this mistake
in Milwaukee a few times, and it almost always leads to disappointment.
But with our modest investment in our riverside walk, we got it
right. We connected, and it has added great value and excitement
to our downtown, and people are walking," points out Norquist.
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