Urban Planning and Public Health

Can Urban Planning Cure Obesity?

With 43 percent of school children in New York City classified as overweight or obese, the City’s Health Department is desperately seeking solutions for a health issue that is no less than an epidemic.

The solution to any problem develops through an understanding of the cause, and common knowledge dictates that the primary causes of weight problems are a poor diet and lack of exercise. In response to the dietary problems pervasive in modern American culture, the Health Department has begun regulating the use of trans fats in restaurant and fast food menus, and targeting neighborhoods with especially high obesity rates for the promotion of healthy food vendors.

But a plan for providing the average city dweller more exercise is more difficult to implement. The Health Department has begun examining the option of promoting greater mobility through urban planning and building codes. After all, zoning and building codes were orginally created in part to control the contagious diseases that festered and spread quickly in a city’s crowded tenements. But is a non-contagious epidemic like obesity, or like asthma, another common ailment among urban youth, controllable through urban planning?

Eva Hanhardt, coordinator the Pratt Institute’s Environmental Planning Masters Program, explains that zoning and land use are responsible for a community’s “general health, safety and welfare.” Her current study on reinstituting helath concerns into urban planning was born when she began wondering why “health doesn’t the same attention as safety and welfare.” She notes that “By neglecting to incorporate public health in the design of land use and zoning policies, these policies have been part of the problem, not part of the solution.”

But what can zoning policies do? To address the ‘poor diet’ half of the problem, they could restrict the amount of unhealthy or fast food outlets within certain neighborhoods, such as those near schools. These restrictions would have precedent in the Zoning Resolution that prohibits sex shops in specific areas.

But in order to promote greater physical activity in children (and also in adults), urban planners need to focus on providing open park space for recreation. New York City claims on of the lowest amounts of park acreage per capita in the United States. The concerns and resources of Parks Department are continually subjugated by other civic needs, and the few parks and playgrounds often disappear to make way for parking or building development. An increase on the minimum requirements for open space would furnish a stage for physical recreation, while more restrictions on environmental risks within neighborhoods would render the outdoor room a more pleasant option.

But perhaps most importantly, increasing attention to the tenets of smart growth and new urbanism can revitalize a community’s health by promoting physical activity in a number of ways. A study at Saint Louis University, almost halfway across the country from New York, was asking the same questions as the Health Department of the nation’s largest city. They found that activity-oriented neighborhoods are the key to improving public health. Dr. Laura Brennan Ramirez of Saint Louis University’s School of Public Health explained that there are a “range of different influences that [get] people engaging in physical activity not just for recreation but as part of their everyday life.”

The Saint Louis University study sifted the attributes and habits of activity-friendly communities into a list of the top factors that promote mobility. Many of the suggestions are aimed towards lessening the dependence on automobiles. “The number of hours we spend in our car everyday detracts from our physical, social and mental health,” explained Dr. Brennan Ramirez. “People are increasingly becoming aware of it. Our dependence on the car is overwhelming.”

The first reccomendation deals with Land Use. Mixed-use neighborhoods with commercial and residential buildings alongside one another encourage walking. The study also showed that crosswalks, sidewalks and hiking and biking trails do promote walking and bike activity. A usable mass transit system provides a Transporation alternative that includes more physical activity.

After all, people are more likely to use the same transportation that they witness their neighbors using, a factor that the SLU study dubs ‘Travel Patterns.’ Advertising and media Promotions can also draw the public eye towards the importance of physical activity, and recreation and mass transit possibilities in their own neighborhood.

Aesthetics also play a much larger role than is generally acknowledged. Residents will be overwhelmingly more likely to walk in neighborhoods with pleasant architecture, trees, parks, or other monuments and historic attractions. It is neccessary for a city to recognize the need for attractive avenues, park and recreation facilities, and bike and pedestrian lanes, by Public Policies that redistribute funds from items that perpetuate unhealthy lifestyles, such as highways. Incentives for Institutional and Organizational Policies promote the creation of physical activity centers and gyms in schools and in the workplace.

An additional study by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health confirms the theory that neighborhood renovation and reorganization may curb our nation’s problems with weight. Dr. Thomas Glass and his colleagues found that those living in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods are far more likely to be overweight. The nationwide obesity rate is at an unsettling 38 percent, with variations apparently responding to the danger of the neighborhood: the least hazardous neighborhoods showed a 27% obesity rate, while the most hazardous neighborhoods have a population that is 53% obese.

Dr. Glass explained that “the risk is not something that can be explained away by personal variables such as dietary intake, tobacco use and household wealth.” The most ‘hazardous’ neighborhoods are not necessarily the most impoverished ones, and little connection was found between income level and obesity rate, once individual risk factors of diet and exercise were eliminated from consideration. Instead, high obesity rates correspond to neighborhoods with high incidences of crime, neglected buildings, businesses and streets, and community disorder.

What this suggests is that a healthy community creates healthy individuals, whether obesity in these situations is caused simply by stress, or a hampered mobility due to fear. The implication is also that the problem is more than simply a personal, case-by-case problem of diet and exercise. “It may be that there are major things going on in our communities that play a bigger role in the obesity problem than simply the fact that people are not eating right and exercising,” declared Glass. “This is an environmental epidemic and it’s going to require environmental solutions.”

Read some thoughts on the connection between urban planning and public health at Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space, an excellent blog by Richard Layman, a self-described “historic preservation and urban revitalization advocate and consultant.”

This entry was posted by Isabel on Monday, November 20th, 2006 and is filed under Maryland, Missouri, New York, Smart Growth, State, Zoning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.