Health professionals: New Urbanism’s newest potential allies

With an estimated 18 to 22 percent of Americans now afflicted by obesity, health professionals are beginning to view New Urbanism as a potential way of injecting needed exercise into everyday life. Since 1980, obesity and overweight have grown to epidemic proportions. Americans are falling prey to Type 2 diabetes, which between 1976 and 1994 shot up more than 38 percent among people over 40 years old. They’re also becoming susceptible to heart problems or other serious chronic ailments brought on by too much weight and too little exercise. “One of the silver bullets is physical activity,” Kate Kraft of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation said during the closing session of CNU X in Miami Beach June 16. “Building walkable communities is tremendously important,” said Kraft, program officer for the foundation, a leading contributor to health initiatives. She urged CNU and new urbanists to take their role in human health seriously. Health professionals could ally themselves with proponents of human-scale communities and create a compelling public health rationale for New Urbanism, she indicated. At a time when more than 50 percent of American adults are overweight and medical costs are staggering, this could spur governments to stop favoring automobile-oriented development at the expense of pedestrian life. First, however, it will have to be shown that in new urban environments, people really do walk and engage in physical activities more frequently than people do in conventional sprawl environments. Hard evidence lacking Scientific documentation of New Urbanism’s superiority from a health perspective now appears to be lacking. (One survey of Celebration residents indicated that they drive less, yet the amount of physical activity was not quantified.) And random, unscientific observation of behavior doesn’t necessarily work to New Urbanism’s advantage. After visiting Seaside and Windsor in Florida, Kraft said she noticed that “the sidewalks are empty.” Maybe she dropped in on Seaside at the wrong time. Certainly people can be seen walking, jogging, and biking in many communities that have pedestrian-friendly designs. But anecdotal evidence won’t win public health and public policy debates. What’s needed, Kraft indicated, is a careful examination of whether walkable new urban communities actually generate physical activity. If the sidewalks are really as empty as Kraft observed, there’s another challenge that she wants new urbanists to ponder: “Think about how you create the pull to get them actually walking.”