Session: Built Environment Institute III. Identifying successes and challenges toward healthy community design and sustainable growth from multiple perspectives – Policy, Politics, Research, Planning and Development
4258.0: Tuesday, November 18, 2003: 4:30 PM-6:00 PM
Oral
Built Environment Institute III. Identifying successes and challenges toward healthy community design and sustainable growth from multiple perspectives – Policy, Politics, Research, Planning and Development
Although much progress has been made recently, the public health community has yet to clearly define a unified and comprehensive research or action agenda for healthy design and sustainable growth, it becomes difficult to design interventions to improve health in urban areas. Creating evidence to drive new interventions requires new interdisciplinary collaborations among public health researchers, environmental scientists, political scientists, economists, urban planners, policy makers and others. Such an approach to public health requires describing the complex relationship between built environment constructs and their environmental outputs on human health outcomes. Tools, such as health planning models based on questions of dose-response, are required to determine how the way in which a community is designed affects obesity outcomes, for example. Issues such as “sedentary mobility” in the auto dominated environment need to be addressed. How the lack of design constrains daily physical activity and the affect this has on human health and the health care pocket book, with respect to cardiovascular disease or cancer, for instance, must be understood to motivate policy change and to fundamentally change the way our communities are developed. After all, our current obesity epidemic is probably not the product of any conscious policy crafted under the title, Obesity by Design. Addressing these issues will assist with developing effective policies that will facilitate a movement toward healthy design and environmentally generative and economic sustainable practices that will ultimately protect the natural environment and human health.
Learning Objectives: At the conclusion of this session participants will be able to (1) identify successes and challenges to healthy design and sustainable development from multiple perspectives – policy, politics, research, and development; (2) understand the economic impact of healthy design on the natural environment and human health; (3) cite two examples of healthy community design; and (4) generate ideas about what a healthy community might look like in a sustainable economy and how to become agents of change toward healthy community design.
See individual abstracts for presenting author's disclosure statement and author's information.
Organizer(s):Neal L. Rosenblatt, MS, MS-C
Barbara McCann
Moderator(s):Barbara McCann
4:30 PMIntroductory Remarks
4:35 PMMaking it possible at the community level – General policy issues
Judith A. Corbett, MS
4:50 PMGenerating the political will to address the health impacts of sprawl
Don Chen
5:05 PMEnvironmental health research toward developing sustainability standards
Howard Frumkin, MD, DrPH
5:20 PMAn architect/planner perspective on planning and economic challenges of sustainable human-focused development
Anthony Bernheim, FAIA
5:35 PMDiscussion
5:55 PMConcluding Remarks
Organized by:Environment
Endorsed by:Community-Based Public Health Caucus; International Health; Medical Care; Occupational Health and Safety; Public Health Education and Health Promotion; Public Health Student Caucus; Social Work
CE Credits:CME, Environmental Health, Nursing, Pharmacy

The 131st Annual Meeting (November 15-19, 2003) of APHA