Marshall, Garrick and Piatkowski are talking about a different set of health concerns: not communicable diseases like cholera, but lifestyle diseases like diabetes. "The literature suggests," they write, "that the shift in industrialized nations toward a more sedentary lifestyle is linked to increasingly auto-dependent lifestyles, which in turn is linked to lower density developments and auto-friendly land uses." Maybe we're designing places, in other words, that make it harder to be active. — washingtonpost.com
10 Comments
Yay you discovered that walking is good for you and sitting on your ass in traffic is unhealthy. Give this guy the Nobel prize immediately.
unhealthy sprawls is not news for architects but if one thinks this article is read by public and the policy makers it becomes useful in making future decisions that shape build environment and its industry/economy. the study is so general and purely statistical that it kind of suggests some day its results might find their way to real estate advertisements and might read like the cigarette warnings.
"buying this home in this suburbia might be bad your health."
as many similar popular media articles, it's more useful impact could be calling for some changes like those improving the suburban sprawls. there has to be ways to remodel the sprawl. regardless the dwell magazine trendy lifestyle depiction of them, the competition called reburbia has generated some projected ideas few years ago.
with the improvements on fossil fuel dependency, online business conducting, decentralization of manufacturing, rising costs of living in the city etc., suburbia might be popular and preferred again.
there is a rapid urbanization at the moment but a lot of it is still speculative and its sustainability is not fully known.
Why doesn't anyone recognize how bad this is for the environment? It's just another resource-intensive monoculture.
It's obvious to many of us, but like Ohran says, it's great that these connections are becoming more evident accross the population. How will architects respone to this increased interest in urbanism and the pedestrian is what I'm most curious about.
Isolation breeds mental illness too, not just physical. I think mental illness is going to be of greater and greater concern going forward.
I think it is too, tint. Infact it's like the elephant in the room. How can we talk about these issues without turning everything in to a partisan fight? It seems so obvious when one considers what solitary confienment does to inmates. We need to be designing for human interaction, becasue when we don't see eachother, not only do we become sad, but we're liable to believe the crazyist shit about one another. We're a lot more alike than not, and a country as heterogenious needs to promote unity above all else...to say nothing about polluting less, living lighter on the land, getting off foreign gasoline, preserving farmland and larger ecosystems...
with the improvements on fossil fuel dependency, online business conducting, decentralization of manufacturing, rising costs of living in the city etc., suburbia might be popular and preferred again.
we currently have an issue with rising suburban poverty, and the number one concern among this group is the high cost of transportation. Cars are by far the most expensive way for the individual to get around, and without some kind of fundamental shift in both development patterns (zoning) and toward multi-modal roadway design, highly auto-dependent middle-class suburbs may never recover.
The other hidden problem is that low density sprawl is very expensive to maintain - and many places are seeing tax hikes and service cuts in order to keep up with their existing infrastructure (not to mention it's expensive just to own a single family house - even with tax breaks)... so it might seem cheaper to live in suburbia, but once you factor in higher property taxes and cost of transportation, you're better off living in a denser, more compact, place.
telecommuting is only for higher-paying white-collar jobs anyway - and there's still a need for centrally-located physical space for face-to-face interaction... If you haven't noticed, the "telecommuting" set are increasingly moving into the "urban core." "online business" still favors a minimum level of density in terms of shipping costs and frequency.
dispersed manufacturing is probably going to start creating something similar to mill-towns of the 19th century - only if these places relax zoning rules.
Tint, that's a good point. Take a look at all these mass shootings. We blame video games and guns but I have never heard one argument in mainstream media about the anti social environment these kids grow up in. The isolation of suburbia must play a part.
Toaster, that's not true. Suburbia is far more affordable than living in urbanized areas. Sure there are cheap urban areas, but dollar for dollar you will get a "safer" area and more living space in suburbia which is important when you have 4 kids. This is a fact that the gung ho urbanists ignore. The problem is not about making cities desirable because many people would love to live in a brownstone in Brooklyn, its about making urban life affordable and accessible. Property taxes are way way cheap in most suburban areas. Long Island is ridiculous...but Phoenix..,like 80$ a month in taxes. Compare that to the 1200$ a month my aunt pays in Brooklyn heights. That's pretty much like 2 mortgages for most people.
The problem that I have with these debates is that we often look at the 2 extremes. One one hand a living pattern and urban form that evolved around early 20th century needs, and on the other a living pattern that evolved out of a desire to escape the mid-20th century city. Neither of these forms are perfectly tailored to suit our early 21st century lives but still we look to them as the only options. Personally I think that there is happy medium somewhere. Someway to build affordable mid density communities that encourage social interaction, allow for on site resource production, are heterogeneous, have clean transit, etc...
tint,
Scientific American just ahd an article on this.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/depressed-try-the-social-cure/
jla-x, I think Toaster's point was that in the aggergate, suburbia costs more. It might be cheaper to eat processed junk food, but in the long run, the health issues will cost you more. I agree that there should be more emphasis on the middle ground though. The fact is sun belt cities are becoming more urban, as are many succesfull suburbs, but this dosen't mean that traditional suburbia is going away. It just means that since it's still covering the vast majority of our landscape, the balance towards pedestrian oriented development is being addressed.
First let's distinguish what type of suburb we are discussing, there are transit oriented suburbs where you can walk or bike to the train or boat and get to centers of employment, these exist and some, perhaps too few are in the works today, and then we have the automobile dependent sprawl.
Farmland in the eyes of politicians such as the Corrupt ones we have in Illinois is viewed as wasteland, potential jobs not realized, so we need to place an airport and an unwelcome interstate to correct this waste of potential, this flawed thinking, mostly politically motivated, is what keeps us on an environmentally, socially and economically unsustainable path that ends with the destruction of our very best farmland consequently located miles from our population centers. Sprawl is a national security threat and we have modern historical precedent to support this thesis. With out farmland to produce food and greater distance to ship that food we compound our fossil fuel dependency.
Not to mention these places are dreadful and they drain the civic capital of capable parents and responsible citizens from where they are needed most.
Online virtual communities may have supplanted some traditional brick and mortar aspects of our lives but we still have a desire for human contact, face to face meetings still happen, and people gather in offices each day to work in close proximity to their teammates This communal aspect of humanity has managed to endure and our cities have grown despite technology giving us even greater potential to isolate ourselves.
Suburbia offers safety predictability and in some aspects affordability, cities will continue to decline and ultimately fail like Detroit if the basic services of schools police and fire protection can't be adequately and equitably provided.
Saving civic institutions is the most effective way to save the environment and to curtail sprawl.
Over and OUT
Peter N
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