PBS to explore effects of urban design on health

Dr. Richard Jackson hosts

Wendy Natt, Aug 06, 09.

PBS will broadcast a new television documentary series that will explore how communities across the US are re-thinking and redesigning their built environments in order to improve public health and create more beautiful, safer places to live.

The TV series, still under production and to air in 2010, is part of a larger public health outreach initiative of the Media & Policy Center known as Balancing Public Space with Public Health. A nationwide community-based outreach and publicity/promotion campaign, this project has produced an interactive web site, educational curricula for elementary school through college, a companion book, a video resource library, and other resources.

Richard Jackson, Professor and Chair of Environmental Health Sciences at the School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles, will host the PBS series. Jackson spoke in Houston earlier this summer as part of Houston Tomorrow’s Distinguished Speaker series, when he addressed a full room at the United Way Community Resource Center, a smaller gathering of medical health professionals from the Texas Medical Center, and a group of local planners, health officials, and community leaders.

A video on the project website provides a preview of the PBS program. In it, Jackson contrasts the glaring differences between neighborhood and community planning that happens with the needs of humans, health, community-building, and quality of life in mind, versus planning practices that seem to ignore and sometimes work against these needs. He talks to planners, community leaders, and architects who are working to create or transform communities and places so that they promote, rather than hinder, health, safety, and natural beauty.

Jackson notes that sprawl and the building of unhealthy, disconnected, unwalkable neighborhoods did not just happen; he says we planned our communities this way - and now we need to rethink our planning policies so that we can get ourselves out of this dilemma.

Good health doesn’t just happen. It takes effort every day to move ourselves toward health. Good places don’t just happen. It takes political leadership, it takes thoughtfulness, it takes good design. Great buildings don’t just happen. Difficult sites, difficult challenges…only with brilliance, only with good architectural wisdom can they be turned into great places.

View the full project proposal (pdf. 1.1MB) for Balancing Public Space with Public Health.