Metropolis Mag has an interview, Our Ailing Communities, with one of the authors of Urban Sprawl and Public Health: Designing, Planning, and Building for Healthy Communities:
The message of the book is simple: our car-dependent suburban environment is killing us. Planners, most notably the New Urbanists, have been saying this for decades, but Jackson’s got the statistics. And the charts. And the tables. In his book and in lectures nationwide, Jackson demonstrates—technically, like a doctor—how sprawl is at least partially responsible for a full range of American diseases, from asthma to diabetes, from hypertension to depression. The reason that we spend one dollar out of six on health care is very preventable, and yet we claim some of the worst health statistics in the developed world.
It sounds like an interesting book, I’ve wishlisted it, but first need to finish reading Jane Jacob’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
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