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Cross-sector collaboration is one of the latest buzz phrases in public health.  However, it is rare to hear of technology sector collaborations between healthy built environment advocates and technology types such as computer programmers and electrical engineers. Health care  has taken advantage of…

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The emphasis on the built environment in public health is hard to escape.  Conferences, podcasts, webinars.......you name it......there is a discussion concerning getting people to walk more frequently in their daily lives.  The task for public health practitioners is to bring evidence to discussions in order to inform decision makers on parks, transportation, and planning boards to consider public health goals in their deliberations. 

If asked, anyone working on community health…

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Transportation planning is increasingly being recognized as an important platform for population health improvement.  While air quality may be the first health issue to come to mind,  transporation planners and engineers influence how our communities are configured and determine the "walkability" &…

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In the year that I have been working on planning guidelines for healthier/walkable communities, I've heard very few elected officials speak of the concept in positive terms.  Remember how someone in Congress called community design interventions to help people become healthier  jungle gym programs.  When you travel to other countries, you can be very disappointed about how poorly our elected officials compare to those in Europe.  It seems American elected officials take pride in knowing as…

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The Active Communities / Transportation (ACT) Research Group serves as a focal point of research among students, faculty, and researchers who specialize in land use-transportation policies and programs relating to "active" communities and/or "active" transportation. The group is based at the University of Colorado (Boulder and Denver). Current projects include examining the factors influencing the types of neighborhoods households choose, how individuals…

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Activities to document our food environment are gaining momentum. The USDA released a web-based tool that provides several food & physical activity indicators for all counties in the nation.

The Atlas assembles statistics on three broad categories of food environment factors:

• Food Choices—Indicators of the community's access to and acquisition of healthy, affordable food, such as: access and proximity to a grocery store; number of foodstores and…

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The American Planning Association is taking the lead in making community health a central principle in municipalities across the country. APA launched the Planning and Community Health Research Center.

According to its web page:

"The Center is dedicated to integrating community health issues into local and regional planning practices by advancing a program of research, outreach, education, and policy. By working closely with policy makers, public health professionals,…

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Much of the discussion taking place in landscape architecture these days revolves around climate change design issues. There is very little direct discussion of how the profession can have an impact on diseases caused by sedentary living. Paul Morris-former president ofthe American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA), speaks directly to the issue of healthy community design & landscape architecture.



This article is from Dirt, the ASLA blog.…

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After a 4-1 vote by city commissioners, Miami, Florida will no longer have the conventional zoning code that helped make much of the city chiefly navigable by car and created harsh juxtapositions between new high-rises and existing fabric such as bungalows and small storefront buildings. Replacing it city-wide is a new urbanist form-based code — based on the Smartcode model code template — that calls for convenient,… Continue