Healthy communities TV series to air

Impact of built environment

Matt Dietrichson, Jan 24, 12.

A new 4-hour series, entitled Designing Healthy Communities, will examine the impact of our built environment on key public health indices, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council Blog:

The series documents the connection between bad community design and burgeoning health consequences, and discusses the remedies available to fix what has become an urgent crisis.

The narrator and host of the series, Dr. Richard Jackson, MD, MPH, has become an icon in the field of public health, and for good reason. A pediatrician by original training and experience, he is now Chair of the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at UCLA. In between he built an unmatched curriculum vitae of distinguished accomplishment in the field of environmental health, and he certainly is a long way from finishing. I am honored that Dick and I have gotten to know each other in the past few years.

Long in the making, the series looks well produced, immensely enlightening and even captivating. The four parts will include:

-“Retrofitting suburbia” to address obesity and diabetes
-“Rebuilding places of the heart” by reviving our older downtowns
-“Social policy in concrete,” addressing the particular risks faced by low-income communities
-“Searching for Shangri-La,” exploring whether there are “ideal” healthy communities

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