How Urban Design Impacts Public Health

“Not all urban areas are created equal, and this can have a big impact on a person’s health. Air quality, heat, food—these are just some of the ways your environment can influence health. Often, it is the poorest areas of a city that have the most negative impact,” writes Rob Reddick in Wired.

Reddick argues that understanding these disparities is increasingly urgent as the world’s urban population is projected to double by 2050. In an interview with Wired, researcher Tolullah Oni describes her research into cities and public health, saying, “I realized we needed to understand the epidemiology of the urban context as the main propagator of diseases.”

As Oni explains, urban planning and design affects everything from air quality to temperature to risk of injury on roadways. For Oni, “Often with developers of public spaces it’s a sin of omission rather than of commission.” In many cases, “What is rarely apparent is what the health cost is, because that cost is born in a different sector and often at a different time.”

Because of the structural scale of the problems, Oni says, “governments have the mandate to ensure health for all. They can’t really absolve any responsibility from that.” Even when development is largely left up to the private sector, “government is responsible also in the legislation holding the private sector accountable.”