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Ah, the
urban form.
Tonight Sarah and I went to Town Hall for a presentation by her employer,
Lawrence
Frank. It was raining intermittently, seeming to come down hardest while
we were waiting for the bus or walking. Well, we're just happy to live in
a place where you can get around without a car--whether by
bike,
bus, or
foot.
Larry's
research analyzes the connections between land use, transportation, and
people's health. It seems fairly obvious: who and how healthy we are is shaped
by our environmental options. People who live in walkable communities walk
more and drive less and as a consequence are healthier. Larry's work, among
other things, attempts to quantify the factors which make a place walkable,
taking into account infrastructure, demographics, and, perhaps most important
and hardest to chart, people's motives and preferences, which trend along
lines of age and gender. It's sad and ironic that today's zoning laws which
separate industrial, retail, and residential uses were begun in part to improve
the general population's health by "moving people out of the shadow of the
smokestack." But these divisions also encouraged automobile use by prohibiting
stores and other services from setting up shop within areas zoned for residences
only. It's all really simple or hugely complicated depending how you look
at it. There are no ultimate points or bottom lines, but the plain truth
is
more
people are obese now than ever before and the numbers keep
growing. |
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