January 3, 2014—The American Institute of Architects and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Center for Advanced Urbanism recently announced the completion of their initial research report on eight cities and urban health, and laid out a path for translating this research into meaningful findings for policy makers and urban planners.
As the AIA explains, more than half of the world’s inhabitants live in urban areas, and this is projected to grow to 70 percent by 2050. Massive urbanization can negatively affect human and environmental health in unique ways, and many of those effects can be addressed through the realm of design. Some of the great health challenges over the next century, including the prevalence of obesity, asthma, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and depression, among others, are both increasing at an alarming rate and frequently linked to socioeconomic factors, physical design and urban environmental factors, adds the AIA.
The Report On the State of Health + Urbanism covers research that so far has been conducted in eight American cities: Atlanta, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Minneapolis, Boston and New York. Teams of researchers have fanned out in each city to gather data about each city’s major design projects. The next step is to determine which city will serve as the ultimate laboratory for design solutions that can have a major impact on public health.
“This research begins to unearth a truth that urban planners for many years have not realized, which is that there is no silver bullet for urban health,” says Adèle Naudé Santos, dean of the School of Architecture + Planning at MIT. “Every city has different socioeconomic and physical layout issues. So the solution to make urban health better is going to [vary] in every city. One of the reasons we wrote the report was to give people a sense that the silver-bullet mentality, from technological or policy perspectives, needs to stop.”
According to Santos, over the coming semester, AIA and MIT will enter into discussions with city leaders, foundations, and local businesses to figure out where they can do the most good through collaboration on creating design solutions that improve urban health environment.
“The research we have done so far sets the framework; what comes next is the real effort to come up with reliable design solutions to the health crisis facing America’s cities,” said Santos.
A YouTube video prepared for the Clinton Global Initiative Meeting in September, “Decade of Design: The AIA Global Urban Solutions Challenge—The American Institute of Architects,” explains more about the collaboration.
