Good housing. Easy transit. Food access. Green spaces. Gathering places. Everybody wants to live in a healthy neighborhood. Bridging the gap between research and practice, it maps out ways for cities and towns to help their residents thrive in placed designed for living well, approaching health from every side – physical mental, and social.

The only book that shows how to transform existing suburbs to create environment- and people-friendly neighborhoods...

Our neighborhoods are literally making us sick. If we truly want to love our neighbors, we must work to create social environments in which people can be healthy. While working in community redevelopment and treating uninsured families, Veronica Squires and Breanna Lathrop discovered that we can promote the health of our communities by addressing social determinants that facilitate healing in under-resourced neighborhoods.

"Re-creating Neighborhoods for Successful Aging provides a crucial foundation for confronting the growing aging population's demands for appropriate housing and environments. This current demographic shift is causing a transformation of attitudes and perspectives about growing older, retirement, and senior housing. To ensure that physical environments meet the changing needs of older adults, a reconception of housing, communities, and neighborhoods is required." "Drawing from the fields of gerontology, health sciences, community planning, landscape architecture, and environmental design, this groundbreaking resource provides an in-depth examination of current elder housing practices and strategies, alongside goals for the future. Housing models, such as continuing care retirement communities (CCRCs), shared housing, and co-housing, are evaluated, and best practice recommendations are presented." "The book closes with an inspiring look at opportunities for future collaboration of health sciences and planning and design professionals for the realization of supportive, life-affirming communities thai will result in healthy aging, active living, and continued community participation for older adults."--BOOK JACKET.

The environment that we construct affects both humans and our natural world in myriad ways. There is a pressing need to create healthy places and to reduce the health threats inherent in places already built. However, there has been little awareness of the adverse effects of what we have constructed-or the positive benefits of well designed built environments. This book provides a far-reaching follow-up to the pathbreaking Urban Sprawl and Public Health, published in 2004. That book sparked a range of inquiries into the connections between constructed environments, particularly cities and suburbs, and the health of residents, especially humans. Since then, numerous studies have extended and refined the book's research and reporting. Making Healthy Places offers a fresh and comprehensive look at this vital subject today. There is no other book with the depth, breadth, vision, and accessibility that this book offers. In addition to being of particular interest to undergraduate and graduate students in public health and urban planning, it will be essential reading for public health officials, planners, architects, landscape architects, environmentalists, and all those who care about the design of their communities. Like a well-trained doctor, Making Healthy Places presents a diagnosis of--and offers treatment for--problems related to the built environment. Drawing on the latest scientific evidence, with contributions from experts in a range of fields, it imparts a wealth of practical information, with an emphasis on demonstrated and promising solutions to commonly occurring problems.

Have neighborhoods been left out of the seismic healthcare reform efforts to connect struggling Americans with the help they need? Even as US spending on healthcare skyrockets, impoverished Americans continue to fall ill and die of preventable conditions. Although the majority of health outcomes are shaped by non-medical factors, public and private healthcare reform efforts have largely ignored the complex local circumstances that make it difficult for struggling men, women, and children to live healthier lives. In Dying and Living in the Neighborhood, Dr. Prabhjot Singh argues that we must look beyond the walls of the hospital and into the neighborhoods where patients live and die to address the troubling rise in chronic disease. Building on his training as a physician in Harlem, Dr. Singh draws from research in sociology and economics to look at how our healthcare systems are designed and how the development of technologies like the Internet enable us to rethink strategies for assembling healthier neighborhoods. In part I, Singh presents the story of Ray, a patient whose death illuminated how he had lived, his neighborhood context, and the forces that accelerated his decline. In part II, Singh introduces nationally recognized pioneers who are acting on the local level to build critical components of a neighborhood-based health system. In the process, he encounters a movement of people and organizations with similar visions of a porous, neighborhood-embedded healthcare system. Finally, in part III he explores how civic technologies may help forge a new set of relationships among healthcare, public health, and community development. Every rising public health leader, frontline clinician, and policymaker in the country should read this book to better understand how they can contribute to a more integrated and supportive healthcare system.

The built environment and public health have a close history of association: from the earliest considerations by Hippocrates of the role of place for human health to the influence of the hygiene movement on architecture, landscape and urban planning. Today global developments such as chronic (or lifestyle) diseases, aging populations and a heavily burdened environment have lent a new urgency to the question of the influence of architecture and urban planning on lifestyles and health. 'Life-Styled', created as part of the Health and Places Initiative at Harvard University, shows by means of detailed graphics how public health issues can be incorporated into the planning of the built environment and how lifestyles can be shaped accordingly. Taking greater account of health aspects when designing (public) space represents not simply an obligation, but also a means to rethink the disciplines of architecture and design.

This book is an examination of neighborhood mobilization and engagement from the perspective of several disciplines: psychology, social work, political science, planning, and education. The essays included in the work examine both internal and external factors related to the ability of neighborhoods to meet the human needs of their residents. They address the constraints put on neighborhood mobilization by the local and international political economy, but they also show how those constraints can, in a number of cases, be overcome by effective action. They treat neighborhood engagement as an educational process through which residents enhance their skills and knowledge as they participate. Taken together, these essays provide a comprehensive and multi-faceted view of the issues facing contemporary urban neighborhoods.