Why city life may be bad for you - not!

[Tim Lund]

The BBC's coverage of a RIBA report released today - City Health Check: How design can save lives and money - seems a fairly sloppy bit of journalism

Why city life may be bad for you

I really don't think that's what RIBA meant - they are more interested in getting the planning right so that cities are healthier, e.g. making it easier for people to walk and cycle rather than use cars, and have attractive green spaces where they can go to spend time out doors, exercising. As a member of the Friends of Mayow Park committee, this is something I very much believe in.

The problem, I think, is that the RIBA analysis, which referred to the correlation between obesity, diabetes and other diseases of sedentary life styles and living in cities, doesn't seem to include income as an alternative explanatory variable. In fact, I suspect that those fellow citizens who can afford to live in desirable central parts of London are doing absolutely fine. I'm not as worried about them as I am about the poor, whether in towns or the countryside. And to have the BBC reinforcing the widespread assumption that for the sake of your health you need to move out of cities if you can really is not helpful!

[hairybuddha]

Unfortunately the word 'British' was missing from the title.

There's no doubt that British city life can be bad for you. Because we have given so much of our public space over to the convenience of motor vehicles over everything else. We now have an ageing, fattening, lazy population living in disgustingly polluted and ugly towns and cities.

One of TFL's pollution monitoring stations (Oxford St I think, but I'll look it up) exceeded it's 2014 allowance for air pollution on 5 January.

[Tim Lund]

Unfortunately the word 'British' was missing from the title.

There's no doubt that British city life can be bad for you. Because we have given so much of our public space over to the convenience of motor vehicles over everything else. We now have an ageing, fattening, lazy population living in disgustingly polluted and ugly towns and cities.

One of TFL's pollution monitoring stations (Oxford St I think, but I'll look it up) exceeded it's 2014 allowance for air pollution on 5 January.

Good points, but it would still be nice to see some good statistics

[michael]

I don't think hairybuddha has visited many cities in Asia or America if he thinks those problems are confined to Britain.

[hairybuddha]

Well of course, but I didn't say that. So I think my point is fair in the context of the article. There are plenty of non-British cities much closer to home that are pleasant and enjoyable (and healthy) environments.

[hairybuddha]

I'll just leave this here:

http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/ ... l-pastoral

[Tim Lund]

Brilliant, HB. I love this quote:

Nobody scorned the rus in urbe quite so much as the American writer Jane Jacobs, who considered the "Radiant Garden City Beautiful" amalgam as a moronic space where "Christopher Robin goes hippety-hoppety" – an image of the ideal city that had little to do with the messier spaces in which the city was lived. Jacobs' disciples would reclaim the treeless innercity spaces of Manhattan, Berlin, Glasgow and many others that had been demonised for decades. She implied that the environment – in terms of local economies, walkability, legibility – was best served by a dense, properly urban city. Places like the Elephant and Castle in south London, which had been replanned so that tall slab blocks formed squares around dense thickets of trees, had made mistakes about how cities "worked".

But Jane Jacobs disciples, it seems created their own orthodoxy within the world of planning:

The gospel of Jane Jacobs, the iconic urban thinker of the 20th century, has become so ingrained in modern planning that it is essentially synonymous with what most people think of as a “good” city. Since the publication of The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961, politicians, urban planners and academics -- virtually everyone who cares about cities, really -- have seen cities through Jacobs’ eyes. Her celebration of the “ballet” of street life, her admiration for diverse, high-density neighborhoods with a mixture of buildings and usages, her animosity toward standardization and “monotony” -- they have all become part of a shared vision of the way a city should look.

Therefore, when someone challenges that vision, it’s noteworthy. When that someone is Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, one of the nation’s most influential thinkers on urban affairs, it’s an argument worth listening to. In his academic papers, his frequent posts to The New York Times’ Economix blog, and in essays for such publications as The New Republic and City Journal, Glaeser addresses big questions in creative ways: “Do Mayors Matter?” “Did Cheap Credit Cause the Housing Bubble?” “When Are Ghettos Bad?” Now, in his first book, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier, Glaeser takes on the Jacobs vision and offers a different set of lenses, one based in urban economics.

Is It Time to Retire Jane Jacobs' Vision of the City?

So - what could be a guide for the perplexed? Should they identify with one fashion or another -

the British garden city,

1960s New York cool,



or today's post modern arrangement of icons of sustainablity -


and bid for attention by the passion with which they advocate one view or another?

Or could we step back and think about measurable fundamentals, such as longevity and other quantifiable health indicators for individuals, reliance on non-renewable resources for global health, and choose our preferred style of urbanism with reference to these? With the sort of data now obtainable about how people move about and interact, it should also be possible to develop a quantified indicator of social health. And while on the subject of what's quantifiable, let's not forget the point made earlier about income and how it varies across society.

It might require being able to think about how to do statistics properly, but at least we'd be spared the language of meaningless scare quotes, such as "worked", “ballet” and “monotony”