What the doctors prescribe

In the 24 chapters of Making Healthy Places, some four dozen contributors offer information and advice on a wide variety of health and planning issues. Here are several specimens and the names of the writers offering them: 

• “There is now good evidence showing that people who use public transit for their daily commutes weigh less and are healthier.” — Richard  J. Jackson

• “There is growing evidence that exposure to traffic emissions is associated with adverse health effects,” including exacerbation of asthma. — Jonathan M. Samet

• “Pedestrian deaths per distance traveled in the United States are three times higher than in Germany and five times higher than in the Netherlands.” The lower rates in those two countries “are partly a result of designing and building safe systems, including road designs that separate vehicles from pedestrians and bicyclists and reduce vehicle speeds.” — David A. Sleet, Rebecca B. Naumann, and Rose Anne Rudd

• “Mixed land use, street connectivity, and residential density are the built environment attributes most consistently related to total physical activity.” — James F. Sallis, Rachel A. Millstein, and Jordan A. Carlson

• The growth of the community garden movement is conspicuous in Philadelphia, where recently some 2,000 people grew more than 2 million pounds of food a year in 300 community gardens encompassing a total of 33 acres. — Carolyn Cannuscio and Karen Glanz

• In Muncie, Indiana, the local Bureau of Water Quality distributed 900 rain barrels and created five demonstration rain gardens. Community members initially complained about “ugly barrels and ‘weed patches,’” but became more receptive once the outreach team demonstrated “rapid improvements in local water quality resulting from slowing storm water flow.” — Lorraine C. Backer

• Noise and crowding aggravate stress and depression. But the critical factor in crowding is the number of individuals per room, not the number of people per acre. “What matters in the experience of crowding is high social density rather than high spatial density.” — William C. Sullivan and Chun-Yen Chang

• Among men, the more walkable the neighborhood, the less depression there is. —Sullivan and Chang

• Neighborhoods with access to parks and retail areas generate more pedestrian travel, resulting in greater social interaction. Residents of pedestrian-oriented communities do more strolling around the neighborhood as well as walking to destinations, and have a stronger sense of community than do residents of vehicle-oriented places. — Caitlin Eicher and Ichiro Kawachi

• “Contrary to conventional engineering practice, safety in urban areas is greater where streets have less ‘forgiving’ designs: fewer lanes, narrower lanes, street trees near the curb, traffic-calming measures such as traffic circles and speed humps, and a constant flow of pedestrians and bicyclists.” — Reid Ewing, Gail Meakins, Grace Bjarnson, and Holly Hinton

• “Often people seeking [community] engagement may feel they need large numbers of community folks to ‘show’ at events, but this can be a hollow gesture. Meaningful cultivation of key people who know the community is often more useful in the long run. Community engagement processes should not be stalled while the organization tries to obtain a large quantity of participants but instead should welcome the quality of participants who can do the work, even if they are few in number.” — Manal J. Aboelata, Leah Ersoylu, and Larry Cohen

• To know whether a community is a healthy place and how it can be improved, consider using tools such as walkability audits and health impact assessments. — Andrew L. Dannenberg and Arthur M. Wendel

• “One way of thinking about the challenge of [making built environments sustainable and healthy] is to consider how people might live as urban hunter-gatherers, incorporating healthy aspects of ancestral lifestyles, such as traveling on foot and growing and eating local food. ... Healthy places are the link between the health of people and the health of the planet.” — Anthony G Capon and Susan M. Thompson