UK Healthy Towns: A Step Too Far?
The government in the UK has announced plans to create "healthy towns" that encourage exercise through urban design. Is this idea going too far to control peoples' activity?
"Gordon Brown’s UK government will now try to design urban areas that force us to exercise more – and that’s official. To tackle obesity with what he called a ‘large-scale’ approach ‘across the whole community’, Brown’s health secretary Alan Johnson has said that he wants to ‘make physical activity a normal part of everyday life’."
"Barely two weeks ago, Johnson insisted that Britain’s potential obesity crisis is one that’s on the same scale as the crisis of climate change. That comparison was ridiculous enough. Now, he has said that both Labour’s eco-towns and other urban areas should be adapted to improve people’s health. Through their layout, facilities and construction, eco-towns could also be ‘healthy towns’. If successful, such an approach ‘could also apply to areas undergoing housing growth and renewal’."
"This is a regime for national fitness worthy of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. Not for nothing has Johnson claimed a past allegiance to Stalinism. In an absolutely illiberal and inhumane manner, Johnson wants urban areas designed so that people’s behaviour cannot at all consist of their own freely decided ‘choices’. Instead, behaviour will be relentlessly controlled by the state. What the Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov did to salivating dogs, or the stimulus-response experiments conducted by US psychologist BF Skinner did to hungry rats, Johnson wants to do to us. Johnson’s view of human freedom is degraded."
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Not so fast
Hmmm. Let’s see, first we nationalize health care. Then, when we find that even a government can’t meet the demand for something that is “free,” they concoct ever more draconian plans in order to reduce costs. We have already seen proposals that would limit or deny some health care services to those who don’t live an approved lifestyle. While I think the article does run off into some hyperbole with regard to “control” of peoples’ actions, I’ve seen more than enough of the totalitarian streak that runs deep within both the environmental movement and the national health care movement to say that it can’t happen. Within the last century, we have witnessed much, much worse, in the name of socialism.
Spiked Article With No Content
This article has no content beyond fulminating and name calling (Pavlov's salivating dogs, Kim Jong-il, ad nauseum).
It says the Health Secretary has suggested that "Through their layout, facilities and construction, eco-towns could also be ‘healthy towns’." But it doesn't say a word about what changes in layout and facilities are proposed to do this.
Does the secretary actually want to do this by adding Pavlovian or Skinnerian conditioning-devices to towns? I don't think so.
If it said something about the design proposed, this article would be worth reading. As is, you are just wasting the time of Planetizen readers by posting links to this sort of fulmination without content.
Charles Siegel
Spiked? Content? When?
As is, you are just wasting the time of Planetizen readers by posting links to this sort of fulmination without content.
If I may, Charles, I think the link is valuable, as this is the best they can do. These particular ideology sites are mostly all the same, & it is good to know they still cannot marshal the facts or offer ideas that the mainstream finds compelling.
They don't lift up, they drag down. We must keep track of their current tactics.
Best,
D