“Road Traffic ‘Single Biggest Source of Fatality’ for Young People Worldwide

Sarah Goodyear. May 3, 2012

When you think of how to achieve public-health progress in the developing world, you might think of engineering clean water sources and sanitation to prevent water-borne diseases. You might think of implementing measures to stop the spread of malaria, like mosquito nets. You might think of distributing vaccines, or designing education programs about HIV/AIDS.

What you probably wouldn’t think of is figuring out how to keep people safe from traffic.

And yet it’s road traffic – itself a marker of progress and prosperity in emerging economies – that in 2004 killed more children around the world between the ages of 5 and 14 than malaria, HIV/AIDS, or diarrhea (that’s the most recent year for which we have full data). According to “Safe and Sustainable Roads: An Agenda for Rio+20,” a new report from the Campaign for Global Road Safety, road traffic is the leading cause of death globally for young people between the ages of 10 and 24.

It’s not just children who are being killed, of course. Some 1.3 million people die every year on roads around the world. That amounts to 3,500 people every day. Millions more – 50 million more annually – are injured. And those numbers are probably underreported.

The report, written by Kevin Watkins, a non-resident senior research fellow at the Brookings Institute, is written in sober, measured language. But you can sense, too, the frustration at how invisible this problem remains, even as it stares us in the face:

The sheer scale of the road traffic injury epidemic is not widely recognised. There is a widespread tendency to see that epidemic in terms of isolated and unpredictable events — as ‘accidents’ that befall unlucky individuals. In fact, there is nothing unpredictable about road traffic injuries. And the ‘road accident’ vocabulary deflects attention from the systemic nature of the risks that claim so many, many lives.

As Watkins points out, the traffic fatality epidemic affects developing countries disproportionately:

Developing countries may have far fewer cars, but those cars are far more likely to kill or maim. With less than 10 per cent of the world’s motorised vehicles, they account for 42 per cent of deaths…. India alone accounts for 12 per cent of total fatalities. But global aggregates such as these can obscure the impact in countries with smaller populations and fewer vehicles. Measured in terms of death rates for every 100,000 people, road traffic injury deaths in Tanzania or Ethiopia are twice as high as in India — and seven times higher than in the United Kingdom.

Fatality rates among children are typically higher than for the general population. In Bangladesh and Thailand, road traffic fatalities account for 38 per cent and 40 per cent respectively of all child deaths among children aged 10-14 – the single largest cause of death for the age group. Taking developing countries as a group, children aged 5-9 in poor countries are four times more likely to die as a result of road traffic injuries than their counterparts in rich countries.

Soaring rates of air pollution also kill people – another 1.3 million annually, according to the report. And 70 to 90 percent of the lethal pollutants that cause those deaths come from vehicle traffic.”

Via: The Atlantic Cities

Photo: Shutterstock

“Healthier Eating Starts on the Roof

Allison Gregor. April 5, 2012

WHEN Yarittzi Estevez and her 8-year-old daughter, Aaliyah Rivers, planted collard greens, zucchini, lettuce and strawberries in theirBrooklyn garden last year, they did not quite know what to expect. But one thing they never anticipated was competition from the native fauna.

“Whatever was outside chewed up those zucchinis,” said Ms. Estevez, who lives in East New York and speculated that the culprit might be a squirrel. “When I went to pull them up, they were all bitten up.”

Hearing a tale of wildlife destroying crops is certainly unusual in New York City. But opportunities for urban gardening are growing as developers, particularly those building subsidized housing, provide land or roof space for herb and vegetable gardens.

One development is Liberty Apartments at 119 Fountain Avenue in East New York, where Ms. Estevez lives. The low-rise complex, developed by the Dunn Development Corporationof Brooklyn, has 43 affordable apartments and, at ground level, seven raised cedar planters, each shared by two tenants.

Ms. Estevez, who moved into an apartment at Liberty when it opened just over a year ago, said the gardening opportunity was not what drew her to the complex. But she said she was quick to take advantage of it.

“My daughter always wanted to do this, so that’s why I signed her up,” Ms. Estevez said. Last year, Liberty worked with the community group East New York Farms to assist residents with vegetable gardens.

At Serviam Gardens, an affordable development for seniors at 323 East 198th Street in theBronx, developers planted a garden for viewing, including one with herbs, on the rooftop. On the ground floor, they provided planters where tenants could garden.

Serviam Gardens has 243 apartments, and about 40 residents have applied this year to share the 36 agricultural plots.

Abby Jo Sigal, a vice president of Enterprise Community Partners, a nonprofit group that served as a partner in developing Serviam Gardens, said affordable housing complexes, which are always trying to squeeze as many units as possible on a plot of land, may be where community gardens are most important. “One of the reasons that low-income communities are focused on green roofs is, often, low-income communities don’t have as much accessibility to open space as other neighborhoods,” she said.

At Via Verde, a new affordable housing complex being marketed in the South Bronx, what started as an idea to provide environmentally friendly green roofs back in 2005 turned into an opportunity to provide gardening plots for residents, said Paul Freitag, a managing director of development at the Jonathan Rose Companies, one of the development partners on Via Verde.

At the time that Jonathan Rose and its partners were selected from among dozens of other contestants in January 2007 on the strength of its affordable housing proposal, thoughts about green roofs were morphing into ideas about urban agriculture, he said.

“There was this real focus on community health and, in particular, eating healthy,” Mr. Freitag said. That focus corresponded to the release of a study showing that many children in low-income city neighborhoods had no conception of what a farm was, Mr. Freitag said.

“Those concerns made us think, if we’ve got these gardens on the roof, why don’t we really make them community gardens,” he said, “and make them opportunities where people can grow food, and even more importantly, where children and community members can see food being grown.”

Via: The New York Times

Photo: Ángel Franco/The New York Times

 ”Demedicalize Architecture

GIOVANNA BORASI & MIRKO ZARDINI. 03.06.12

We live in a state of pervasive anxiety. Every day we are confronted with environmental problems: the energy crisis, pollution, decreasing biodiversity, climate change, new epidemics, the externalities of industrial production and consumerist lifestyles. We perceive our bodies as constantly at risk (from sources difficult to pinpoint) of contamination and disease. This increasing concern and obsession with health and well-being, mainly among urban populations in the West, is triggering an inevitable process of medicalization; ordinary problems are increasingly defined in medical terms and understood through a medical framework. [1]

We are so carried away by the idea of health that we have created a new moralistic philosophy: healthism. [2] Health is no longer identified primarily with the absence of illness, but with a state of general well-being concerning all types of functioning, from physical and biological to social and cultural. Nevertheless, our ambition for total well-being is fragmented and parcelled out through disconnected policies and actions. The production of a healthier body to withstand (inevitable) deterioration is today achieved through voluntary biomedical interventions and individual efforts (“staying in shape”), supported by new environmental urban planning policies.

Contemporary architecture and urban planning seem to address uncritically the conditions and context in which this discourse on health is developing. In most cases, the design disciplines rely on an abstract, scientific notion of health, and very literally adopt concepts such as “population,” “community,” “citizen,” “nature,” “green,” “development,” “city” and “body” into a professionalized, disciplinary discourse that simply echoes the ambiguities characteristic of current debate. Practitioners also ignore the fact that economic processes are closely intertwined with environmental processes, and especially that concepts of the body, health and sickness are products of history, politics, economics and culture. To properly “diagnose” urban problems, we must not speak of health in abstract terms, but rather of various ideas and states of health. As Jonathan M. Metzl has noted, “‘health’ is a term replete with value judgments, hierarchies and blind assumptions that speak as much about power and privilege as they do about well-being. Health is a desired state, but it is also a prescribed state and an ideological position.” [3]

The book and exhibition Imperfect Health do not represent a comprehensive survey of the relationships between health, architecture, cities and the environment. On the contrary, we mean to highlight some of the uncertainties and contradictions present in ideas of health and health care that are emerging in Western countries today, particularly in Europe and North America.”

Via: Design Observer

Image: Kayt Brumder, Breathing Room, thesis project at The Cooper Union, New York, 2009. [© Kayt Brumder; all images courtesy of the Canadian Centre for Architecture]

“America’s Health Threat: Poor Urban Design

by Scott Carlson

Researchers can have revelatory moments in remarkable places—the African savannah, an ancient library, or the ruins of a lost civilization. But Richard J. Jackson’s epiphany occurred in 1999 in a banal American landscape: a dismal stretch of the car-choked Buford Highway, near the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

Dr. Jackson, who was then the head of the National Center for Environmental Health at the CDC, was rushing to a meeting where leading epidemiologists would discuss the major health threats of the 21st century. On the side of the road he saw an elderly woman walking, bent with a load of shopping bags. It was a blisteringly hot day, and there was little hope that she would find public transportation.

At that moment, Dr. Jackson says, “I realized that the major threat was how we had built America.” His center had already been dealing with problems that he suspected had origins in the built environment—asthma caused by particulates from cars and trucks, water contamination from excessive runoff, lead poisoning from contaminated houses and soil, and obesity, heart conditions, and depression exacerbated by stressful living conditions, long commutes, lack of access to fresh food, and isolating, car-oriented communities.

Treatments could come in the form of pills, inhalers, and insulin shots, but real solutions had bigger implications. “More and more, I came to the conclusion that this is about how we build the world that we live in,” he recalls, speaking over the phone from San Francisco.

Dr. Jackson, who is now a professor and chair of environmental health sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles’s School of Public Health, has become one of the leading voices calling for better urban design for the sake of good health. Georges C. Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, says that Dr. Jackson’s work has been highly influential in public health and public policy. Dr. Benjamin first started talking with Dr. Jackson about the links between urban design and public health in the 1990s.

“It was an eye-opening moment for me,” Dr. Benjamin says, adding that those links have since become widely accepted among public-health specialists. Dr. Jackson’s work, he says, “gets people who do not view themselves as health providers or health practitioners to begin thinking about their role in public health.”

Via: The Chronicle of Higher Education

Image: Richard Jackson waits for a bus outside Los Angeles International Airport. The UCLA scientist is a leading voice in the call for better urban design for the sake of public health. (David Zentz for the Chronicle)

“In a Bronx Complex, Doing Good Mixes With Looking Good

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

Published: September 26, 2011

tHe co-ops and rentals for low- and moderate-income residents spiral around what will be a leafy, semi-enclosed court. Single-family town houses are taking shape alongside a 20-story apartment tower overlooking the sea of housing complexes that have transformed the neighborhood in recent years.

The rebirth of the South Bronx isn’t news. But Via Verde is. And it makes as good an argument as any new building in the city for the cultural and civic value of architecture. The profession, or in any case much talk about it, has been fixated for too long on brand-name luxury objects and buildings as sculptures instead of attending to the richer, broader, more urgent vein of public policy and communityengagement, in which aesthetics play a part.”

Via: The New York Times

Photo: Phipps, Rose, Dattner, Grimshaw

“How An Innovative Bathhouse Keeps Rural China Healthy

BaO Architects’s Split Bathhouse in China’s Gansu province helps prevent the spread of waterborne diseases by giving residents a clean, welcoming place to take a shower.

 When it comes to improving health care for residents in developing regions, solutions range from sourcing clean drinking water to administering affordable vaccinations. But in some cases, preventing the spread of disease can be as simple as providing a safe, sanitary place to take a shower. Beijing-based BaO Architectsdesigned the Split Bathhouse in rural China to fulfill that role while providing a relaxing place that has become the center of a community’s social life.”

Photo: Fast Company