Designing Healthy Communities

Design Decisions and Public Health

A provocative and challenging new 4-hour public television series (2012), Designing Healthy Communities, hosted by celebrated author and teacher Richard Jackson, MD, MPH. Dr. Jackson makes the case that the rapidly deteriorating public health of our citizens is linked directly to nearly half-a-century of bad design decisions, now frozen in concrete. Each of the 4 hours looks at the different impacts our built environment in urban and suburbia areas have on key public health indices---obesity, diabetes, heart, asthma, cancer and depression. Dr. Jackson links bad community design with burgeoning health costs, then analyses and illustrates how ordinary citizens, including many young people, are trying to do about this urgent crisis, by looking upstream for solutions before ill health and disease occurs. Dr. Jackson inhabits the frontier between public health and urban planning, and offers us hopeful examples of innovative transformations.