" A healthy city is one that is continually creating and improving those physical and social environments and expanding those community resources which enable people to mutually support each other in performing all the functions of life and developing to their maximum potential. " (WHO Health promotion glossary 1998)
One of the basic infrastructure that needs to be addressed to achieve a health city is the streets. The days where scientists convinced people that their living habits were causing them chronic diseases are long gone. The world has taken a shift from blaming food companies, physicians to Architects and planners. It is also more like the Architects and Planners woke up to their nightmare that they have been creating as cities and started acting towards reforming it. So what did the Jeffersonian grid do other than splitting neighborhoods and communities apart?
While traffic count is taken as a factor to design the road, the community it is running through needs to be taken into account. This will help neighborhoods to strive to be health districts thereby making a healthy city in combination with one another. Richard Johnson in his video on 'Designing healthy communities' agrees to the fact that America's streets are designed to be 'fundamentally unhealthy'. He also brings to attention that these 'streets prevents Americans from walking, inhibits us from socializing, removes trees that makes the air healthy'.
Another main infrastructure that needs to be attended to is the public realm that goes beyond just streets. Throughout history since the Nile Valley civilization, we have seen the influence of public gathering spaces, parks and recreation spaces in their communities. The suburban sprawl that Kunstler refers to as 'the greatest misalocation of resources in history', was busy planting new homes and cul de sacs that the attention towards creating a community was lost eventually. Howard Kunstler also claims that by 'degrading the Public realm we degrade the quality of one's civic life'.
The combination of efficient street design and communal spaces for all the neighborhoods in a city with equal resource distribution in mind would help us travel towards producing healthy cities.
References:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1ZeXnmDZMQ
Comments