Health and Community Design: The Impact Of The Built Environment On Physical Activity

by Lawrence Frank, Peter Engelke, Thomas Schmid

Health and Community Design is a comprehensive examination of how the built environment encourages or discourages physical activity, drawing together insights from a range of research on the relationships between urban form and public health. It provides important information about the factors that influence decisions about physical activity and modes of travel, and about how land use patterns can be changed to help overcome barriers to physical activity. Chapters • the historical relationship between health and urban form in the United States
• why urban and suburban development should be designed to promote moderate types of physical activity
• the divergent needs and requirements of different groups of people and the role of those needs in setting policy
• how different settings make it easier or more difficult to incorporate walking and bicycling into everyday activitiesA concluding chapter reviews the arguments presented and sketches a research agenda for the future.

Genres: Urban Planning

271 pages, Paperback

First published May 23, 2003

Reviews

[Julian Dunn · Rating 5 out of 5]

A dense, but still relatively accessible academic treatise on various aspects of urban design (transportation systems, zoning, street design, etc.) that impact individuals' mobility and physical activity and how this has changed, at least in America, over the last 100 years. Setting aside some questions of causality -- not to mention my annoyance at yet another book that accepts the purported "epidemic of obesity" as completely factual -- the authors effectively illustrate how all of the aforementioned factors have dramatically changed the proportion of walking, cycling, and other active transportation models relative to passive transportation modes.

This is obviously not news, but it was still helpful to understand the history of how certain urban planning choices came about. For example, much of the Garden City and consequent single-family dwelling zoning arose from an era when epidemics of disease such as cholera were believed to arise from bad air, or "miasma", i.e. before we understood bacteriological causes of disease transmission. Despite our increased scientific knowledge, implicit biases against apartment buildings or denser structures remain.

The only irritating thing about this book is that it is written by scholars who lean far too heavily on the passive voice, a voice that is often relied upon in academia to sound more erudite, but for the common reader, just sounds pompous. Obviously, one can't expect too much from an independent publisher, and one also imagines that the audience for this book is likely to be other academics, but the sentence structure just grated on the nerves of your humble reviewer, a layperson.

[victoria lowerson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a good overview of the relationship of the built environment and physical activity.