Bringing Public Health into Urban Revitalization Workshop Summary (2015) / Chapter Skim
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5 Cross-Cutting Issues That Face All Urban Environments
5 Cross-Cutting Issues That Face All Urban Environments
Pages 55-74
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From page 55... ...
In listening to the day's case studies, Goldman said, she was reminded of the problem that doctors face in the development of new and novel treatments. That is, although there is often a lot of support for the development of new therapies -- from the National Institutes of Health, for example, or from various private companies -- there is much less support for the necessary next step of seeing that new, effective treatments are adopted widely by the medical community.
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From page 56... ...
Although doctors deal with individual patients, community health practitioners are dealing with thousands or millions of individuals who are going to be affected and who also need to be engaged and involved in the public health efforts. "One thing that we heard in common between all of these processes," Goldman observed, "is that one way or another, they always have a tremendous amount of engagement and involvement of the communities." A second complicating factor is that the environment in which public health efforts take place varies from community to community, so there will always be questions about just how applicable a particular approach is in a given community.
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From page 57... ...
Again, how do we respond as people are asking for action, asking to move forward? " One of the most encouraging approaches, he said, is the collaboration between public health practitioners and designers, epitomized by the publication of Active Design Guidelines: Promoting Physical Activity and Health in Design by the New York City Departments of Design and Construction, Health and Mental Hygiene, Transportation, and City Planning (Lee, 2011)
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From page 58... ...
The city's medical officer came across the idea of active design and decided to incorporate it prominently in the health center. Instead of hiding the stairs, for instance, he gave them a place of prominence in the design as a way of celebrating and encouraging physical activity.
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From page 59... ...
" Although he knew nothing about green building, he recognized that the green building industry has been successful at this sort of thing, so he ended up leading a collaboration among the National Collaborative for Childhood Obesity Research, the U.S. Green Building Council's Center for Green Schools, and the National Academy of Environmental Design.
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From page 60... ...
It means that we have a really powerful potential partner for scaling up health: the green building industry. There are some health-related credits waiting to be utilized, but currently they are not really being utilized in any sort of directed way." Trowbridge cautioned that not everything in LEED makes a perfect health measure.
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From page 61... ...
Trowbridge answered that the development of those metrics is a task that still needs to be done. "No one is sitting off quietly with a secret set of the perfect health and wellness metrics for the real estate industry at this moment," he said.
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From page 62... ...
It is the one thing. People need to walk, walk, walk, and then they need to walk some more."5 He then introduced Sarah Hammerschmidt from the Urban Land Institute, noting that the institute has been looking at the business case for healthy communities.6 Hammerschmidt told the workshop audience that she and the institute have a new report coming out that was prepared in partnership with the Center for Active Design, which created Active Design Guidelines (Lee, 2011)
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From page 63... ...
"As we think about the health metrics for the real estate industry at the building scale, is there a way to think about how these get aggregated up? Are there metrics connected to the kind of data that are available at the macroscale so that we can incorporate some of these ideas into very large scale economic development projects?
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From page 64... ...
Community amenities like parks, better housing, health food stores, improved transportation, and improved schools are known to contribute to increased property values, he said, but "how do we ensure that these increases in property values and amenities don't push poor people out because they can no longer afford them?
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From page 65... ...
"For example, the ubiquity of unhealthy food in poor neighborhoods is a market failure of our food system." The classic solution for market failures -- such as information asymmetries, externalities, and various inefficiencies -- is government intervention, he noted. "In several sectors, such as food, housing, transportation, and education, the public sector and the market sector coexist, sometimes in partnership and sometimes in competition," he said.
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From page 66... ...
. chronic disease managers, and community health workers may offer a way to create new jobs within poor communities that also have other benefits to the community, like improving health," he said.
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From page 67... ...
Changing the subject, Balbus referred to Freudenberg's suggestion of hiring community health workers as a way of providing accessible jobs with an upside. "Is the Affordable Care Act or anything else," he asked, "providing enough of a market incentive to pay, .
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From page 68... ...
IMPROVING COMMUNITY HEALTH In the day's final presentation, Hazel Edwards of The Catholic University of America discussed five broad issues that are key to improving community health in the context of urban revitalization. She began with a definition of health from the World Health Organization: "Health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity." Health, Edwards said, is not just a personal issue; it affects the entire community.
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From page 69... ...
" Part of the answer lies in the saying "When we make places for cars, we get places for cars; when we make places for people, we get people who are engaged and active in our community." Edwards showed beforeand-after images of a city street, the first of which was dominated by roads and parking lots, in other words, an area designed for cars. The second showed a cityscape with something for everyone: roads as well as widened sidewalks for pedestrians, bike lanes, a lane devoted to a streetcar, and plenty of trees to provide shade and beauty.
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From page 70... ...
Much of the 20th century was devoted to development that separated land uses, with large numbers of people moving outside of cities into suburbs, Edwards noted, but in recent decades there has been a return to the city and more mixed-use and transit-oriented development, along with the desire to create destinations so that people will have places to walk to. "Walkability is great," Edwards said, "but you need a place to walk to and places [people]
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From page 71... ...
It also means more investment in quality schools." The final issue she described was community engagement. Referring to the earlier presentation by Dan Kinkead of the Detroit Future City Implementation Office, Edwards noted that he had spoken about the importance of not taking a top-down approach in urban revitalization efforts.
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From page 72... ...
Discussion Canice Nolan of the European Commission began the discussion period by noting that he had heard very little at the workshop about federal efforts to encourage urban regeneration. Goldman responded that HUD does have such a program.
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From page 73... ...
2011. Active design guidelines: Promoting physical activity and health in design.
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From page 74... ...
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Urban Land Institute.
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