Creating Livable Cities -- A PBS Documentary Offers Lessons for Sane and Healthy Lives

Speaking to a sympathetic audience in the rotunda of Los Angeles City Hall last Tuesday, Dr. Richard Jackson asked a question.

"How many of you walked or rode your bike to school as a child?"

Almost everyone at the gathering sponsored by the Trust for Public Land, an environmental group, raised their hand. 

"How many of you have a child or a grandchild who walks or rides their bike to school?"

Two people out of 65 raised their hands.

The exchange and the surprised silence it provoked brought home the message at the heart of "Designing Healthy Communities," a four-hour documentary series featuring Dr. Jackson that airs on PBS affiliates across the country starting this week. 

"We have built America in a way that is, I believe, fundamentally unhealthy," he says in one of the opening sequences. "It prevents us from walking. It inhibits us from socializing. It removes trees and the things that make our air quality better." 

Dr. Jackson first crystallized his thinking about urban design and health in the summer of 1999, as he barreled down the seven-lane Buford Highway in Atlanta on the way to the Centers for Disease Control, where he worked as director of its National Center for Environmental Health. He was late for a meeting and in a hurry, but couldn't help noticing, on this sweltering day, an elderly woman trying to negotiate an improvised and dangerous expressway crossing. As cars whizzed past, she inched forward, bent double and burdened with grocery bags. He kept driving, but couldn't forget her struggle and what it revealed to him:

"We could not have designed an environment that is more difficult for people's well being."

Since then Dr. Jackson has become of the pioneering thinkers in the emerging field of the Built Environment and Health.

I first met Dr. Jackson in 2005, when he had returned to California after serving for nine years at the CDC. At the time, he was in his final days as state health officer under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. He agreed to come to Fresno to speak to journalists participating in the inaugural class of our USC Annenberg journalism education program, the California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowships and later to join our program's advisory board.    

Inspired by his ideas in Fresno, we designed an un-walkability tour for journalists to explore the consequences of the urban sprawl of Fresno. Aided by William Dietz, MD, PhD, director of the Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity of the CDC and a local public health leader at UC Merced, our Health Journalism Fellows visited a mall so sprawling that customers had to drive from one end of the mall to another to get from store to store. Then we headed to a residential neighborhood separated by a freeway from the local elementary school. These are the overlooked urban planning details that transform daily life into hours spent behind the wheel. Over the years, Dr. Jackson's ideas about the "built environment" and health have continued to influence our program. 

Urban planning lies at the heart of his vision.  Dr. Jackson's documentary series argues that the creation of the American suburban dream, during the post World War II economic expansion, undermined the fabric of our cities and the integrated nature of urban life. In cities where shops, restaurants and housing exist side by side, residents can walk to get a gallon of milk, run into neighbors at the local coffee shop and take public transit to get around. Creating similar, effortless everyday opportunities for exercise, he says, would go far in combating our obesity and diabetes epidemics.

Episode 1: Retrofitting Suburbia (preview all episodes here) from MPC on Vimeo.

The segregation of housing from work and retail life has a particularly pernicious effect on the elderly and the young - who need a ride from the suburbs for any social or practical interaction. That lack of autonomy leads to depression and isolation, he says.

The documentary goes on to highlight forward-thinking urban planners such as the designers of Atlantic Station, in Atlanta, a public-transit and bicycle-friendly retail/entertainment/housing complex built at the shuttered site of Atlantic Steel, and Bellmar, a planned community in Colorado, built on the site of an abandoned shopping mall called Villa Italia.    

As chair of Environmental Health Sciences at UCLA, Dr. Jackson has made an uneasy peace with the city best known for urban sprawl in the country. He lives in faculty housing that is walking distance from campus. He commutes on weekends to see his family in Berkeley and only half-jokingly refers to Los Angeles International Airport as Dante's Seventh Circle of Hell. As he walked across campus recently, he paused to admire the mature Italian Stone Pines in a courtyard and to bemoan the windowless labyrinth that is UCLA's School of Public Health.  An admirer of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Dr. Jackson argues that such details of daily life make existence worthwhile. And that is what "Redesigning Healthy Communities" is all about. 

Next Up: Excerpts from Michelle Levander's Interview with Dr. Jackson

Photo credit: Kim Scarborough via Flickr