WELLNESS CITIES
ACTIVE DESIGN
Jacqueline Bennett looks at whether, by adopting a new approach to design and city planning, we can make our cities – and their populations – well again
E 50
ven Mick Cornett, the enterprising mayor of Oklahoma in the US, couldn’t have envisaged the huge impact his ‘We’re going to lose a million pounds’
campaign would have on the city when he launched the initiative in 2008 (
www.thiscityisgoingonadiet.com). After 18 months – with local restaurants providing healthier options and sports facilities offering special discounts – the city’s residents had collectively lost half a million pounds in weight. But it was only after citizens agreed a seven-year, one cent increase in sales tax to fund new bike lanes, sidewalks, hiking trails, ice rinks, green spaces and wellness centres that the city fi nally reached its target in 2011. Oklahoma reputedly now has the highest adult employment rate of any city in the US. Firms are keen to invest and relocate there because the work- force is so much fi tter than in other cities. Not only has the city become healthier, it has become wealthier too.
Evidence and policy
Much is now being written about active design – designing, constructing and managing our environment in such a way as to encourage people to be active (see HCM March 14, p5). It’s an exciting idea and one that has had a long genesis in town planning in the UK. The National Planning Policy
Framework (NPPF) demonstrates how the planning system can play an important role in promoting healthy
A promotional video by the mayor of Oklahoma was aimed at inspiring the US state’s residents to get active and lose weight
communities, leading to reductions in health inequalities, better access to healthy food, reduced obesity, more physical activity, better mental health and wellbeing, and improved air quality. Meanwhile recent major reforms to planning and to health and social care – notably the National Planning Policy Framework 2012, the Health and Social Care Act 2012 (which created local Health and Wellbeing Boards) and the Localism Act 2011, which ush- ered in neighbourhood planning – now
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present many opportunities for joined- up thinking to improve people’s health. These opportunities have been high- lighted by, among others, the Town and Country Planning Association through the Reuniting Health with Planning: Healthier Homes, Healthier Communities report. This report offers an overview of how local authorities can improve health and reduce health inequalities by bringing together related disciplines such as housing, transport planning and regeneration. It includes a section designed to help identify links between public health objectives and how places can be shaped to respond to them. Alongside growing statutory endorse- ment of the benefi ts of better town and city planning for improving health, fi tness and quality of life, a raft of other documents and initiatives have emerged. In 2003, CABE Space – a specialist unit of CABE – was set up to champion the importance of urban pub- lic space, particularly parks and green spaces, in improving quality of life. Meanwhile, in what has turned out to be a prescient document, Sport England published Active Design: Promoting opportunities for sport and physical activity through good design in the mid-2000s, integrating agendas around design, health and transport and setting out many examples encap- sulating the three design objectives of improving accessibility, enhancing amenity and increasing awareness. In its City Health Check – published in 2012 and analysing health problems correlated to the amount of green and public space available in London and England’s eight ‘core cities’ – the Royal
ISSUE 4 2014 © cybertrek 2014
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