- Planning for Health and Sustainability (Low-Fat Cities)   1732 kb by    Perry, Guy | guyperryinvi@gmail.com    Short Outline The way in which our cities expand impact, not only on environmental sustainability, but on human health. Increasingly, current physical living patterns in transition economies make it challenging for humans to lead healthy and balanced lifestyles. Brazilian and Polish developments strive to keep their cities and their inhabitants lean. Abstract The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the central role that planning and urban design can play in determining the health of inhabitants of urbanized areas and it[simplequote]s immediate promise to help address more general environmental sustainability issues. The way we create our physical environment, especially at the urban scale, has a greater impact on our health, than was previously considered. Issues of health and the environment during the late 19th century and most of the 20th century were largely related to levels of pollution and contaminants in the air and water, as well as related issues of disease. As populations become wealthier, in the late 20th century and thus far in the 21st, we have new health concerns that are an outgrowth of our new living patterns at the scale of the city. The US now devotes 17% of GDP to supporting an increasingly unhealthy population, by 2030 over 25% of UAE citizens will be diabetic and in Brazil 1% more of the population has become obese during each year of the last decade. These trends cannot be explained by changing diets alone. Current (2013) research by the NIH in the US, UK, China, India and Brazil has charted a precipitous course of an increasingly sedentary population from the last few decades to beyond 2030, that has a direct repercussion on health and well being of humans at a global scale. While increasing work and leisure [quotright]screen time[quotrightB]play a significant role in alarming trends of obesity, hypertension and diabetes, so does the organization of our physical environment. Our fragmented urban expansion patterns discourage basic living patterns that are healthy for humans and this is especially the case in the expanding areas of cities in rapidly developing countries. The paper will focus on case studies in Brazil and Poland, which will analyze existing planning, urban design and living patterns on the urban frontier of cities. It will examine density, interconnectedness, movement systems, distribution of land uses and microclimates. It will compare specific and intentionally very different urban development projects that attempt to counter key challenges to health within these urban frontier areas. The paper will also suggest that tackling the very tangible issue of health may also be a way of effectively grappling with general issues of environmental sustainability. Given that environmental sustainability continues to be considered an abstract, non-pressing issue, by most, health, in contrast may serve to reframe these related issue to create a platform for an immediate planning dialogue. The urgent issue of human health, when seen through the lens of planning, will raise awareness that by building more humanly oriented urban environments, we are addressing human environmental sustainability at a global scale as well. Keywords Health Sustainability Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2013: Frontiers of Planning - Evolving and declining models of city planning practice   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper