'Urban Sprawl and Public Health' offers a survey of the impact that the built environment can have on the health of the people who inhabit our cities. The authors go on to suggest ways in which the design of cities could be improved & have a positive impact on the well-being of their citizens.

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.

A state-of-the-art approach to urban health intervention and research.

Urban Public Health grapples with the complexity of the urban setting as a physical and social space while also providing an abundance of global and local examples of current urban health practices.

Urban Sprawl is not simply a development that undercuts the quality of life for suburbanites. It has raised alarms across the nation, as fair housing advocates, environmentalists, land use planners, and even many suburban employers who cannot find the workers they need, have recognized that the costs go far beyond aesthetics. Despite the agreement that something needs to be done, there is no consensus on what works. Urban Sprawl: Causes, Consequences, and Policy Responses assembles leading scholars who analyze the major causes and consequences of urban sprawl and the policy initiatives that are being explored in response to these developments.

Across the nation, the debate over metropolitan sprawl and its impact has become pivotal to urban planning. A decade and a half ago, Smart Growth America and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency sought to raise the level of the debate by sponsoring groundbreaking research to quantitatively measure sprawl and its quality-of-life impacts. The resulting measures are widely used in urban research and public health. Costs of Sprawl provides a panoramic guide to urban form in America, measures sprawl for metropolitan areas, urbanized areas, and counties, and studies the relationship between sprawl and quality-of-life outcomes. From this preliminary investigation, it looks like the costs of sprawl are varied and substantial, and the alternative of compact development is far superior. An essential read for researchers, planners, urban designers, policy makers, and smart growth advocates in the U.S. and abroad, this book provides a comprehensive and detailed analysis of one of the most critical issues in planning today.

The second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century witnessed important changes in ecology, climate and human behaviour that favoured the development of urban pests. Most alarmingly, urban planners now face the dramatic expansion of urban sprawl, in which city suburbs are growing into the natural habitats of ticks, rodents and other pests. Also, many city managers now erroneously assume that pest-borne diseases are relics of the past. All these changes make timely a new analysis of the direct and indirect effects of present-day urban pests on health. Such an analysis should lead to the development of strategies to manage them and reduce the risk of exposure. To this end, WHO invited international experts in various fields - pests, pest-related diseases and pest management - to provide evidence on which to base policies. These experts identified the public health risk posed by various pests and appropriate measures to prevent and control them. This book presents their conclusions and formulates policy options for all levels of decision-making to manage pests and pest-related diseases in the future. [Ed.]

"Urban environments have enormous impacts on health of populations, with close to 80% of the U.S. population living in cities; public health and planning professional are presented real challenges to create the healthiest environment possible. Traditionally, the discipline of urban planning has concerned itself with the built environment -- buildings, roads, utilities, and the like -- while public health concerns itself with the health of people who live in that environment. A major challenge, then, is how to incorporate concerns for health as an integral part of urban planning initiatives, rather than simply measuring the health outcomes after planning decisions have been made. This book now equips public health professionals to participate effectively in the planning process, building positive health outcomes into planning schemes. This book not only provides real guidance on how to solve these issues, but also has case studies that show how effective these policies can be."--Publisher's website.

The United States is among the wealthiest nations in the world, but it is far from the healthiest. Although life expectancy and survival rates in the United States have improved dramatically over the past century, Americans live shorter lives and experience more injuries and illnesses than people in other high-income countries. The U.S. health disadvantage cannot be attributed solely to the adverse health status of racial or ethnic minorities or poor people: even highly advantaged Americans are in worse health than their counterparts in other, "peer" countries. In light of the new and growing evidence about the U.S. health disadvantage, the National Institutes of Health asked the National Research Council (NRC) and the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to convene a panel of experts to study the issue. The Panel on Understanding Cross-National Health Differences Among High-Income Countries examined whether the U.S. health disadvantage exists across the life span, considered potential explanations, and assessed the larger implications of the findings. U.S. Health in International Perspective presents detailed evidence on the issue, explores the possible explanations for the shorter and less healthy lives of Americans than those of people in comparable countries, and recommends actions by both government and nongovernment agencies and organizations to address the U.S. health disadvantage.

Throughout much of its history, the United States was predominantly a rural society. The need to provide sustenance resulted in many people settling in areas where food could be raised for their families. Over the past century, however, a quiet shift from a rural to an urban society occurred, such that by 1920, for the first time, more members of our society lived in urban regions than in rural ones. This was made possible by changing agricultural practices. No longer must individuals raise their own food, and the number of person-hours and acreage required to produce food has steadily been decreasing because of technological advances, according to Roundtable member James Merchant of the University of Iowa. The Institute of Medicine's Roundtable on Environmental Health Science, Research, and Medicine held a regional workshop at the University of Iowa on November 29 and 30, 2004, to look at rural environmental health issues. Iowa, with its expanse of rural land area, growing agribusiness, aging population, and increasing immigrant population, provided an opportunity to explore environmental health in a region of the country that is not as densely populated. As many workshop participants agreed, the shifting agricultural practices as the country progresses from family operations to large-scale corporate farms will have impacts on environmental health. This report describes and summarizes the participants' presentations to the Roundtable members and the discussions that the members had with the presenters and participants at the workshop.