Open House Lecture: Ann Forsyth, “What is a Healthy Place? Cities, Neighborhoods, and Homes

I'm Sarah whiting I'm Dean of Harvard's Graduate School of Design and I'm here to welcome you to our very first virtual open house it's pretty amazing to pull this off I want to thank our amazing Communications and events team particularly Matt Smith who set that groovy chill soundtrack thank you so while we all rather be together in gondhal I will say there's an aspect to the virtual open house that I find actually pretty interesting since attendance isn't constrained by geography or cost this should be our most open open house ever so there's something to mind in there in terms of greater openness on the the virtual playing field might offer all of us tonight's lecture is by Professor and Forsythe who's trained in both architecture and planning she works mainly on the social aspects of physical planning and Urban Development forces current research focuses on developing healthier places in a suburban izing world with overlapping emphasis on Aging and planned communities but the really the main focus behind all of her research and practice is how to make more sustainable and healthy cities which makes her incredibly timely in terms of a speaker tonight before I turn over the podium to Ann however I want to just cover a couple housekeeping notes those of you who have been using zoom recently and I imagine that all of you have may notice that tonight's webinar has some different features please note that the chat function has been disabled so that we may all focus on Ann's presentation and will respond to questions and answers after she's finished her lecture so you the audience are welcome to send questions to her at any point during the talk by clicking the Q&A button on the bottom center of this student screen and I'm also very excited to announce the launch of the GSD virtual public lectures featuring featuring the voices of some of our own faculty as well as some people from outside these lectures will happen on zoom' during the month of April so marker for April sevens with Dan DOCA April 10th with you honest Enescu April 13th with Leila Khalil II April 17th with Jenny and and a French April 21st with Debbie Barrino Mateus all of those lectures will be at noon and then on April 23rd we'll have a lecture with David Joslin that'll be at 6:30 p.m. all of these will happen on zoom' and all of them do require virtual attendees to register more information about each event as well as how to register is available on the GSD s website and now let me turn our virtual podium over to Professor and for sighs she's the Ruth and Frank Stanton professor of urban planning and director of the master of urban planning program at the GSD thank you well thank you Sarah for that that lovely welcome this is really an unusual time with a great deal of uncertainty but while it's a moment of crisis and response eventually we're going to experience recovery and a new normal and so tonight I'm going to speculate about what planners and designers can do to make places healthier in the new normal sorry just sharing my screen public health has a broad toolkit and there's definitely they're experts in the in the current crisis but there are roles for planners and designers in making healthy places because I am an urban planner I focus on the scales of the neighborhood city and region however you'll notice that the title for my talk tonight includes homes because the home is very important not least because so many of us have been ordered to stay at home and hence the title of the talk so tonight I'm going to examine this issue in three parts first I want to outline the pandemic challenge of crisis and response as it relates to urban areas Planning & Design now this is an area where others at Harvard and elsewhere have done terrific work and I'm just reflecting on that work as it frames the path forward for healthy places second a number of people are asking whether this pandemic will be the death of high-density cities the question of whether higher or lower density places are healthier has a long history in planning and design from 19th century worries about cholera to 21st century angst about urban sprawl the short story is that the research findings in terms of health are mixed with pros and cons for different densities and because of this I feel that though there will be a new normal after the pandemic urban areas will survive and finally I wanted to propose how they might become healthier looking at six models for healthy neighborhoods and cities that currently exist that have strengths and weaknesses but together address the built environment collaborative processes vulnerable populations and technology now up to now the results of these healthy community models have often been somewhere else underwhelming but in some ways the crisis that that really highlights the importance of health may help prioritize them in a productive way now to make this argument I'm drawing on my own past work empirical work on physical activity and food environments and doing health assessments and our new towns and model communities as well as work translating research by others on a range of health topics to create evidence-based guidelines now I actually have citations on the slides in like tiny fonts that are pale so they're not too distracting but I'm going to get them all up on my website and for safe niche sort of over the weekend and they'll have a link to how to get them there on the events website in the next few days now this work has been done in a variety of locations but in Harvard it's included the health and places initiative and the healthy places design laughs now I don't want to go into too much detail about kovat 19's this is something we're all living but I need to briefly set the stage for thinking about creating healthy places in the new normal and first of all this is a very complex disease because it's highly infectious and can be passed through the air and in part this leads to a great deal of uncertainty about how infectious it is how deadly whose benefit who is most affected and the health problems are really quite wide-ranging certainly there are health problems from the disease itself the infection but there's also stress worrying about the disease and the challenge of whether the healthcare system can cope both the staff and the equipment this image from the Global Health Institute at Harvard puts the healthcare challenge quite clearly showing the difficulties if if the pandemic is unabated and it certainly might not be a great time to have a stroke if we were to do nothing but we are doing something and there's been a vibrant response that's changed many people's lives around the globe however there are also health problems from the response from social distancing and economic changes and this affects everyone particularly the vulnerable older people those with low incomes those who are now unemployed and those on the margins people like the homeless in the United States and those in unhealthy housing everywhere there's a lot of different effects to do with stress and isolation exposure to poor indoor air quality homelessness inability to access food we are all living this but some of us have the benefits of delightful supportive healthy homes and neighborhoods and some do not so it's a time when vulnerability is particularly important now one measure of the of the health is is this health effects is dis and here I want to give you a sense of scale in the u.s. in 2018 which is the last time for which we have full date or about 2.8 million people died from all causes a large 16 at the Imperial College London released a very influential a report that estimated that with no interventions there would be 2.2 million deaths from covin 19 directly from covin 19 in the United States now this was the report that led me to write a blog on the on the GSD website and to really start reflecting on this of course there have been interventions so the numbers will be lower today the University of Washington released its newest figures this is a terrific group that do projections and those projections range above and below a hundred thousand and there are similar situations in lots of places all around the world the diagram on the Left shows the place data from the Imperial College with death rates in various places without interventions the pink so this is actually not happening because everyone's intervened and with them in blue and you can see that interventions are really working now there are higher projections for deaths and disease and they tend to assume that no actions are taken a lot of mutations happen in the virus and overwhelmed hospitals a lot mean other diseases are not treated now in 19th century planners and maybe the earliest 20th century planners and designers worried a lot about infectious diseases and indeed activities like providing clean water and sanitation has improved life expectancies around the world and although I put that in the 19th century it's still a current problem in many parts of the world to provide things like clean water but for the past decades planning and design have been rather more engaged with what they could do related to chronic diseases long-term exposures and changes related to climate change and you can see in the diagram part of the reason why chronic diseases have been going up and infectious diseases have generally been going down the diagram is a little confusing that both sides are the same time period from the early 2000s to 2030 and as I'll discuss later the chronic and non communicable diseases are ones where planning and design can make some difference of course in addition although covered 19 is infectious disease chronic diseases are not irrelevant as the CDC reports people with certain kinds of chronic disease like heart disease diabetes and asthma are more susceptible but we are not at a typical time with declining infectious disease currently we're in kind of crisis response is and this is a visualization from Johns Hopkins that I captured about a couple of hours ago though of course the numbers are approximations because people different countries have different standards for testing and diagnosis but as you can see the confirmed cases have passed the Myanmar just today so we have to wait for a vaccine a treatment or enough people to recover and build up immunity to go on without stressing the healthcare system and the response is vary a lot by place some places like Singapore managed to mainly mitigate a moderate level with a lot of testing not a lot of travel isolating the sick quarantine in the exposed but other people have had to go to social distancing of the majority or the entire population and sealing borders and there's also been a need to mitigate the health effects of the response for example economic packages that allow people to eat and be housed or programs of social support so what does this mean for urban areas Planning & Design well certainly there are a lot of interesting statistics out there and those who are interested there are terrific sources but I think that may one important thing to think about in terms of planning and design in this period is that we need to think about three different time frames for now planning and design have certain niches for instance humanitarian architecture or providing data or giving voice or being a voice for public inclusion beyond the digital divide this is also a time when green and healthy buildings and landscapes matter although in most cases they need to have been put in place beforehand however it's in the recovery in the longer term where our skills and thinking about healthy housing neighborhood cities and regions come to the fore and that will be in my main area of focus finally was Prelude with health data I'm gonna just start to talk about this issue where some are questioning whether dense urban areas can survive as proximity spreads the disease so as a preliminary answer I want to say that it's far too soon to make this argument in fact peer places like Singapore Hong Kong and South Korea that are higher density experience size and Murs in past decades prepared for pandemics and have been doing better than other places this diagram from the Grattan Institute in Australia because the Australia is in each diagram shows case is not deaths and up for various provinces and and countries up to a week ago and you can see that some high-density places like South Korea Hong Kong and Singapore are doing well and without some of the massive closures that are those societies have had to have using testing tracing in case isolation I don't want to be too firm about this because everything is moving a week ago there were they were all using a different set of systems and it's so fast evolving however it just gives you some preliminary sense that there's not a direct relationship between high density and and co vat19 so having laid out the pandemic challenge i want to turn briefly to the topic of health and density starting by getting us on the same page about health and then briefly delving into density i just am very passionate about people understanding density so i've held myself back and there's only about three slides so health is a very personal issue and if i were doing this in person i would ask you to define it and and when i would do that there would be dozens of distinct definitions from not being held back in what you want to do to a kind of complete set of a sense of spiritual awareness this is the classic World Health Organization definition of health being a state of complete mental physical and so for well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity so for Public Health Fox health is the sort of the larger concept into which well-being fits many other fields for instance public policy would reverse the hierarchy and see health as part of well-being along with good housing worthwhile jobs engagement and so on so health is a complex topic and for this talk I'm going to move between talking about health and well health I'm going to use health and well-being interchangeably using both terms so how does health connect to place well this diagram is a fairly classic social determinants of health perspective at the core of health is the blue square your biology and behavior who your parents were if you smoked if you go rock climbing I have low blood pressure not because of my virtue but because my father had low blood pressure at the broader level the green box is this wider system of ecosystem society media government work which broadly framed your capacity for health and is how you can see why in the current period with the economy why why it's so important and in the middle are a number of social dimensions as well as place and if I had to tell you one thing to do to be healthier it would be to be educated but places have influence by protecting you from harmful exposures connecting you to the resources to be healthy and providing supports for healthy behavior and this leads to a number of connections between health and place and for most of them the healthy places initiative at the GSD developed research summaries a few years back and this includes topics the exposures connections and supports and also populations like older people children and those with low incomes I'm just going to highlight four dimensions to give you a sense of the range of this work the broad ways in which urban planning and design can intersect with health for example air quality both indoor and outdoor has a fairly clear literature not of course no health literature is completely clear but I can say that with current technologies you don't want to put a childcare center beside a freeway for instance um how help the environment affects social capital and connections is more complex the literature is ILECs consistent definitions multiple kinds of social connections but it seems that different kinds of environments support different sorts of interactions and there's no clear benefit of higher density environments although this may be disappointing for those who like to make high-density vibrant places and they certainly do foster social connections but there are other kinds of social connections that can happen in other kinds of environments and finally on topics the issue of mint in for mental health there are very very clear benefits of being able to see green things for mental well-being for stress reduction and cognitive improvement but people are really still working to find dosages is it enough to look at a screen saver or something Green is a potted plant enough or do you have to have a more substantial green experience it does seem that low dosages can be very good but it's a an area of current research and finally the issue of populations is key again all the people younger people those with low incomes experience environments differently so a healthy environment for one group may not be for another and this is actually important for planners and designers often we want to sort of make an environment that feels good for us and it may not work so well for other people which is a purpose for research so whatever the higher density cities fit in all this particularly in a pandemic well I just did want to have a brief aside to talk about what density means because at the base density is really just things in an area but there are lots of different densities population densities tree densities and so there is and there are a lot of related terms so there's a great deal of confusion one area of great concern that's quite important for something like covert 19 but also for very many health outcomes is the confusion between population density people in a land area and crowding which is actually a perception that is often about people measured as people per room you can have a crowded farmhouse in the middle of nowhere and you could have a dist district of high-rise condos that are second homes that may have very few people living in them with a low population density so it's very hard to match so so crowding is quite different I mean if it would have very low crowding so crowding is very different to the physical form also there's often a confusion between density and building type but as the diagram shows you can arrange the same density in lots of different ways scale matters in that if you measured density just the tower block it would be higher than if you include the whole lot and finally there are many confusions about other related terms people think that is a high-density but me means tall and ugly buildings housing people from a different social group now I have removed a gazillion slides at this stage because I'd love to tell people about density but not everyone but but I that's for another talk what I do want to do is cut to the chase and say that in both higher and lower the research on balance shows that both higher and lower densities couldn't be good for health and sort of a code of 19 as well so in core cities and denser places there are good service services and accessibility they have good health care and it's often easier to provide things like clean water in lower densities suburban and rural areas they have many clean and green benefits and can be less expensive and the relationships though are not always linear there may well be a optimal density for physical activity that is somewhat higher than typical densities in the US but lower than some other parts of the world the pros and cons of density also vary by population the kind of environment in the image is a pretty good one for many populations a mixed-use area with a pedestrian street but some mix juice environments that work really well for able-bodied adults have air quality problems traffic trip hazards and a number of other features that are concerns for the young and the old this means that they need to be well designed and that planners and designers have a strong role and again thinking about covert 19 with this idea to lower densities in in that case certainly load these can make it perhaps easier to do social distancing and be less exposed but once you go to a funeral or a sports event and become sick there are fewer healthcare resources so unbalanced it may be useful to be in a low intensity area but not in all cases so that's the pandemic challenge it's real and it's mediate and we're living it at the moment but they will soon be a period of recovery and then the new normal and preparing for those periods is key and in preparing for them we don't want to like throw out higher density environments they have benefits along with costs and so what does this really mean for healthy places how can we analyze as you can see in the diagram here the kinds of environments that can promote health and then design better ones so here I'm gonna rely on some work are published fairly recently on health and modal communities briefly when you look around the world it attempts to create healthy cities and neighborhoods ahead of us but they do tend to cluster into some camps more comprehensive approaches ones that use population groups to build allies and those that use healthcare industries and health technologies as an organizing principle for covered 19 they actually provide different assets if we had to place them if we actually had these in in action in more places they would have helped with the crisis response and recovery as well as being beneficial in the longer term this is partly because of their actual physical design but partly because they typically create a collaborative organizations which could be a helpful part of dealing with co19 and other health health issues I do want to say that in a lot of the world I just get in clean water and sanitation would be a really big step forward through the healthy places design lab Rahul Mehrotra healthy places design lab and other hardwood sources real myheart roads been doing really terrific work on sanitation but these models do show how to do more and some of them are applicable in many locations so classic healthy places use the built environment as well as what are called inter-sectoral collaborations or interdisciplinary collaborations to improve health now the built environment approach of protecting from exposures connecting to resources and supporting healthy behaviors has been around for a long time the 20th century is replete with model communities parks and playgrounds and sanatoria and we're now a wash with like bike infrastructure green buildings and community gardens this is what planners and designers can do and it's actually a part of the toolkit for responding to carbon 19 in fact Bogota has apparently expanded their bike lane system quite substantially to prevent covered 19 spread by reducing the density of or the crowding of people on buses so that's an example of an environmental response this is kind of our palette as planners and designers the collaborative approach which is exemplified by the World Health Organization healthy Cities program comes out of a different sort of source out of the health promotion movements of the 70s and 80s that led to other initiatives like health and all policies now what this does is it fosters collaboration between health and other experts including urban planners and designers along with communities business government and education it uses policies and programs as well as environmental changes and though the success to date of these programs has been often underwhelming and they've sort of gone out of action they have real potential and they have also been used in both rich and poor countries a lot of the emphasis in both approaches though not the total emphasis is on preventing chronic disease and giving given that such diseases are exacerbating over 19 they could be part of a solution this is an example of the sort of healthy built environment meeting some of the the collaborative approach in a project that I did with collaborators at the GSD where we reviewed hundreds of articles to come up with evidence-based strategies for the built environment exposures connections and supports but we also looked at the process of planning designing and implementing healthy places and because it matters how people and institutions are involved and how strategies are tailored to local areas a second case is Belfast healthy cities when the longest-running examples of the World Health Organization healthy cities program in Europe in place since the 1980s like many of those programs it came from a D industrializing city using health as an organizing principle they've done a lot of different things healthy city plans health equity health impact assessments healthy build environments but most importantly they they represent a structure for a long running running collaboration around health and in both other sectors including planning and design the second set of models population-based lenses uses older and younger people as a sort of focal point for improving cities and neighborhoods more generally um they sound really similar but in fact they have quite different theoretical underpinnings the age-friendly communities approach which is an idea and World Health Organization program is based on health promotion healthy cities i new york with the illustration to the left is one of the larger ones they're often participatory and they look at a range of issues from housing and transport to social support in the arts but generally in this area of age friendly communities there's been a lot of innovations in housing services social connections and mobility child-friendly communities come from Child Development the rights of the child but do incorporate place by effectivity z' like safe routes to school in part because the local environment is so important to children a pandemic in this case affects all the people the most but generally a focus on the vulnerable is useful in targeting resources and these kinds of these kinds of projects can set up supports that are often missing in the current response I fear for example that there are a lot of isolated older people at present and these kinds of programs designs and plans could help that I just want to say that that child-friendly cities while often having a more conceptual and education based focus do involve planning and design in this case a participatory design the park but when you think about the the UNICEF child friendly cities goals issues like rights to services participation safety and play are really key issues that we need to grapple with in the current period with so many children at home and in families going through stress the last sort of models are these health technology cities and I actually used to think these were fake healthy cities focused on jobs and health care and that and the health care jobs might not be healthy and if they were the smart health environments they may be using technologies to just monitor unhealthy behavior I got really sick of people asking me how to make a smart health environment as if it would do the create the kind of collaborations and sort of long-term structural changes that some of the other programs create but I have come to see that these are very exciting to many and quite complementary to the more comprehensive or population-based approaches so in one hand would be a city based on health care jobs sort of like a science city for health and they could then layer on additional health and well-being features beyond just health care jobs a smart health environment uses environmental technology and monitoring to be healthier the illustration to the left is an extension of that kind of idea rating Cambridge as being fairly healthy for aging this AARP index is database is actually pretty good and available throughout the United States this whole area raises the issue of the digital divide which is something everyone is struggling with at the moment with co19 but combined with other healthy cities models could be quite impressive an example of the healthcare industry city is run to Minnesota home to the Mayo Clinic and in their recent plan they're mostly focused on economic development but they have some well-being features and certainly as we see the healthful out of the economic situation at present there is certainly something to be said about a healthy economy helping human health this 273 hectares not sitting outside Tokyo is an example of a smart health environment it's planned for about 26,000 people and residents and 10,000 workers and it has things like a high-tech Health Center and Smart Watch data visualization and health promotion through for exercise and things another example of Singapore has senses to get all the people more time across the road these can be actually helpful if not earth shattering and combined with the other models could really help to further health so thinking about the current pandemic it seems that the emphasis on chronic disease exposure prevention connection and support the planning and design have really used for a long time are still relevant as we move from crisis mode to placemaking mode and the new normal if for instance if your people had chronic diseases the situation would be less severe of course planning and design can only do so much for chronic diseases but we still are part of the picture in addition that is the sort of areas that we've focused on the past are typically the big killers for any one year and they're they're valuable to focus on themselves so thinking about the the Austrian so but like these models in addition um covered 19 response also combined spatial strategies coordination sensitivity to vulnerable populations technology so in a way covered 19 though in a different way and with a different set of strategies is showing some benefits of collaboration let's hope in the longer term and some of those collaborations could one imagines be set up for the longer term both the future pandemic preparation but also for just a longer term sense of a healthy community there's a lot more I could say about health there's a whole range of ways in which affordability is really important services and support civic participation and so on but III think I'll sort of conclude now and I just want to sort of sort of make some final points first there are very important groups in the design fields and planning fields that do crisis response people are building field hospitals sheltering the homeless providing real-time data to understand who's using how many people are using public transit these are very important topics but our fields come into their own in making healthy places for the longer term in recovery and the new normal and to make healthy places less in responding to Coba 19 will involve combining environments with programs policies and being part of a collaboration further so that the pandemic challenge has actually you know the response has modeled some sort of beneficial activities like collaboration in terms of the the density question and where the cities have a future cognate 19 is unlikely to lead to the end of urban areas but I do think there'll be a chance to rethink how to create healthy places for different kinds of people and to channel the energy from sort of crisis response into a longer term and finally there are a number of existing models that provide a starting point although all of them need to be developed quite a lot more but this might be the moment actually a good moment to be coming to planning and design school so with that I is this right so I am now me I hope I want to say that now I'm going to sort of read your questions and try to respond this is sort of funny thing of reading it on a screen but I do want to say that just before I start on the questions that often in these kinds of talks I make people think for a moment and then share with a partner what might be one or two things they could do either in their own life or in their work to try and foster health everything from being a little more kind to someone to thinking about larger kind of models for creating healthy places and I do hope that as we just start to answer questions you might be thinking about as we do questions and answers some of those those activities so my first question is quite a good one how do you predict kovat 19 will change the way we think about a designing public spaces such as parks pedestrian plazas and others types of spaces where people can congregate in public I do you think that this will be an area where there is the way there are some changes it it will be hard to leave our current period immediately I do want to say that there are very interesting examples in the short term in this current social distancing period as well as the longer term so one example in you should when you finish the lecture you should Google Singapore social distancing or antisocial distancing Singapore has been incorporating social distancing and placing sort of tape all over the city about how does social distance and some of the clauses that they've created at just amazing works of art and so I think it even in this moment there are some ways that that you can think artistically but in the longer term I we have to think about how many times we're in places that we are very crowded together and where the experience of covert 19 might make people feel less sure you know there are in many there are only so many of those spaces and they're often things like events faces or their outdoor spaces for them so I think it might be a little bit more about programming and uses rather than actually changing the space the related topic hit here though is Oh people may know to hear me yes the the related topic here though is that that the sharing economy which is part of our sort of semi public space these days is a munoz as a kind of complicated future in some ways where people want to still share the same scooter but in in other ways it could be that the sharing economy might make people want to use a scooter and not transit so I think it's actually still an open question and a little bit more about usage and programming than particularly about the design of the space accepted in more detail level spacing our chair that sort of thing so someone asked about Planned healthy communities and the ones that did not reach rate their original lofty goals why didn't they achieve the health successes they hope to achieve it is hard to achieve sort of a lot of goals in the long term and some do it in one dimension and not another so an example I quite like is combine Alden Scotland which was designed as a pedestrian environment and for quite a while they had a and they used they had pedestrians completely separated from traffic and it was fairly high density so people could easily walk around and get to shops and we're quite a while they had terrific statistics in terms of safety and accidents but after a while people started to worry about these off road paths that they were on all the time and the safety issues like the personal crime safety issue so they're competing thoughts about crime safety and traffic safety were sort of at odds and eventually people stopped using the paths and has actually often been similar situations where something changed where it began to be the initial idea was no longer as as interesting but I do think that if you know the pandemic is making people really think about health and what is meaningful so there may be more energy of the long term to think about health I have another question talking about that social distancing is a privilege certainly what can you do for people like informal settlers who have to live in a crowded space and have to go out for food maybe it's a wicked problem that you can't solve this is a big issue and and poverty that leads to crowding is a major problem and it's going to be really rough in a crowded place where maybe the sanitation is not as good weather isn't easy clean running water if kovat 19 reaches environments like that it's going to be really really rough it was really roughly for Kovan 19 there are environments that deserved attention from governments and wider society way before we faced kovat 19 and so I think what it may do is highlight the need to just create generally healthier environments if people have sort of adequate space clean water and invite and and sort of lower levels of chronic diseases they're going to be able to both resist covered 19 somewhat better and also they'll be able to deal with the response much better so I'm hoping that it sort of raises this larger question that health is something that people that everyone deserves and environments we're covered 19 response is hard deserve our attention all the time so someone asked do you think that the cities are going to change on the positive side physically socially after the crisis or the pandemic it is hard to tell you know I'm a very hopeful person I think planners one of the core values in planning is optimism and so for me it may be a moment where people can take away a sense of the health is important that social relations are meaningful that we're in it together and that making a healthier place in the long term really makes a difference on the other hand past crises that and if you think about the depression which did go on for very long time it did make a sort of it made a generational change perhaps not towards making healthier environments but people that was written in a generation that volunteered a lot but other other crises have not necessarily fundamentally changed things after 9/11 people eventually went back to you know flying a lot and so on and in fact that led to some more suspicion and security and so on so I'm actually hopeful that it can be channeled in positive ways but I'm certainly not sure that's going to happen Oh someone is actually a really nice question oh what's most important for us a smart healthy built environment or a sustainable one or do you always think a smart one will be sustainable well that's actually two questions one of which is some of the healthy is a healthy built environment sustainable mostly but not always human health and ecosystem health are very strongly tied but they're not exactly the same and so for instance if you're looking at something like climate change and the heat from you know effects on climate change which are terrible for all the people and really can lead to a lot of health problems the public health answer is to give someone an air conditioner and the probably the most rigid but air conditioners of course adds to greenhouse gases and so on you can design them better but it's as a clod of classic a little computer conflicts of that sort so they're always totally the same but they're very similar and so I think that you can have sustainability and healthy environments together now the smart environment is not always healthy or sustainable sometimes you're just adding a gadget and stir but I'm trying to get a little bit more hopeful about those thinking that they will that that there's really a lot of promise and excitement about technology and if you're a covert nine can kind of geek there's been some fantastic visualizations and things that of disease and so on that really can help one rethink the way whether one things about the world that have been quite useful so you know I think and and but also at the scale of the neighborhood and so on and a lot of these senses and things are quite useful so there's a long way of saying I think health and sustainability not the same but often really really similar and smart cities often not sustainable but they could be and so I think that's really a challenge for planners and designers to figure out how to sort of resolve those contradictions so the the next one is to say it's asking about the tech models or the the models and particularly the technology ones that they're designed for wealthier urban spaces and that is true although some people have taken some of those models into into law in come communities there's a lot of really interesting kind of mapping squatter settlement or using sort of apps the the cell phone is widely used in many low-income communities like it's even if it's shared and there are ways you can use it but definitely those are for wealthier spaces the ones that have been used mostly for lower-income communities are the sort of classic healthy cities the collaborative activities those have been used around the world to try and break through silos between government business and communities to foster health and sometimes they're running a program like immunization it's not necessarily making big environmental changes but that can really help bring people together around health and the age-friendly communities and the child from the community is a kind of link to that because they sort of balance programmatic and place-based strategies and finally healthy built environments I use a lot of many the healthy builder environment strategies are infrastructural providing clean water but parks and playgrounds and some of it is engineering but a lot of it is is planning and design and so definitely you're right the technology ones are a little harder to apply although as technologies change and become less expensive there are definitely some ways forward I'm actually part of a project that will with people from engineering and anthropology and social medicine trying to think about how to make more inexpensive technologies to help older people stay at home not only in the US but elsewhere so the next question is to just I mean I'm just trying to it's a little the next question is asking how in recent history has architectural design changed in societies and urban spaces impacted by similar pandemics well the short story is the other pandemic in the world at the moment of the other main one is HIV and AIDS and in a way that's had a more modest environmental impact because it isn't as contagious it is contagious and it's a tragic disease but if the the there's not being this wide scale social distancing and the last time there was one of these very wide pandemics I suppose it was polio if you know this is a pretty unique circumstance so there aren't a lot of there isn't a lot of historical knowledge about how planning and design have changed in the past the next question is actually a really excellent one as we spend more time indoors do the pandemic it brings to mind how healthy interiors might be an important part of healthy communities can you speak or strategies for cities to promote healthy and over environments and what that might mean for designers and planners moving forward now this is a fantastic question with so many people stuck at home this is a really important question and it's partly a question that has really looked at through green building and and how its lucky to have the Center for green buildings and cities that really focuses centrally on on that issue indoor air quality really causes a lot of disease and some deaths all around the world we often don't think about indoor air quality as being an issue but it's more than that there's actually other health issues from the interior everything from domestic violence when you can't get out to escape it as easily to isolation for people who are home alone particularly those who are not as tech savvy it could be really tough at the moment for people who either are tech savvy or don't have the income to have reliable internet this can be these can cause a lot of mental and issues but also it just means that you don't have support there so definitely there are a number of strategies that planners and designers can use from the design side the sort of the idea of the sort of robust green building is often a healthy building and there are people like Holly Samuelson and others in the architecture department looking that I think it's more on the planning and at the end this side are thinking about the sort of the social relations that allow people to sort of connect with each other and so on so I think that this is a major issue that has both sort of green building dimensions but many many social dimensions so let's do oh if you were graduating from the GSD virtually between lovely in a few short weeks where would you place your talents and energy for the biggest impact now how might this pandemic reframe where and how should consider engaging professionally well this is very interesting because it's in part a question of where to get a job but also where you can make a difference and here I'm going to actually talk a little bit more on the planning side because that's where I've been thinking about it a bit more I'm a member of the board of the American Planning Association and part of discussion groups there and we've bee and the APA has been doing quite a lot of actually useful work on this one issue is to figure out how the world will change will the sharing economy disappear well people still want to share their air B&B lodgings will we have Zipcar anymore and so on so sort of thinking about how the it will the way public spaces use change we have to rethink events even if we don't have to rethink the the space itself could there be opportunities to actually sort of do some redesign thinking about the street is more of a bigger social space so thinking about the the recovery I think is quite important like what's going to happen and then actually having the skills to think about these sort of long term interdisciplinary collaborations so putting yourself in a place where you can sort of collaborate with other fields because it's actually going to require quite a lot of interdisciplinary collaboration to solve these problems of course to do interdisciplinary collaboration you need a discipline so you need to know who you are to start with but being able to reach out further I hope that's fine Emilia we can talk more later that's one of our maps so so as asked intriguing question when designing building for healthier neighborhood what's the typical time frame the one should think ahead for or expect to see an impact from the designs within a year or a decade well this actually does very little by profession when you're an architect you can kind of build it and it's done a landscape architect you have to kind of wait for it to grow and planners are doing these 50 year plans and then rejiggering them in 10 and so on but the sort of the broader answer is I think it's important to think in several timeframes one of which are where can you have some short-term wins and they may be to do with crisis response so they may be to do with trying to do this sort of move to the new normal as as we're in recovery so think about you know what a possibilities in the short-term what are design interventions planning strategies and so on and then think about what's a sort of a framework five years and 10 years that just sort of aiming to to reach so I just think that looking at it from multiple frames and the crisis response recovery and longer term is good but it really varies by field sort of what kinds of long-term strategy or how long the long-term strategy is um oh this is actually a nice one who should actually also do this but else all are having a tip now how would public space is an open space says change when it comes to campus design is interesting I actually think that campus is a really sort of classic sort of design and for something like say Hobbit's campus they've done a number of things like having moveable chairs and so on that allow you to use that same space in lots of different ways so I think this issue of flexibility is already starting to be built into campuses and that's very useful but I do think that we I'm an immigrant so I always I live quite a lot of my life online already but this is making very much more of our life so I could imagine that we may have more hybrid virtual real spaces and but this is I'm not sure how you how important that's going to be for health but it could be quite interesting in the longer term we don't know which kind of pandemic we're going to focus on in the near future it's quite impossible for us to tell what the next one is and so can we say the model of a smart healthy built environment is not constant yes it is hard to tell what pandemics or even just challenges will have for instance when you think about climate change there's floods and droughts and there are zoonotic diseases are sort of vector-borne diseases like dengue and Zika and so on moving around there's a lot of moving parts not only in pandemics but just in sort of general changes in the world but one of the issues about these these models for healthy places is they're actually not static models they're not models that say you need to build this environment in that way and you know repeat a blueprint that typically it's a little of that in the healthy built environments but even those ones think about how to collaborate across sectors to get these things done and to sort of tailor approaches to local area and a number of them particularly the healthy cities for apron communities are child friendly communities are really about collaboration and about responding to the circumstance about being very sensitive to each community and to changes and so I think the models are both process and product and that allows them to respond to changes like pandemics all those almost other changes that we're really certainly having come through climate change for instance how does one balance the need for local interventions and the challenges association with regional cooperation that's hard to achieve well this is an issue and it's a different issue in different countries because different countries have different levels of cooperation and different levels of regional sort of governance and I could talk about several places but maybe we'll talk about the United States as a kind of difficult case here because the u.s. is not a strongly regional thinking place the places where it is interesting the places where our regional government exists regional planning exists very strongly in the United States the two kind of classic cases Oregon and Minnesota happened under Republican governors and that happened because in part because regional governance is very efficient and you can save money but one of the nice things about health is it actually is a cross country cutting area now people might disagree and how much they want to spend to make people healthy or whether they think people should you know it's more personal or whether it's more societal when most people are for good health and so I do think that health can be one way to try and build some regional cooperation it is very difficult and frankly the main ways that happens is either is through money the Regional Planning example of wanting to save money or in the u.s. regional planning occurs in transportation because federal funds come with it so I think that to get regionalism requires money and so it's actually the local interventions that are easier and often win out even if they're not as good as the regional ones so basically I however at the moment the we're in many places we very much focused on health so this might be a moment where regional and local concerns can align more so how important is it for designers and planners to study behavioral changes which would fundamentally change our experience of a public space I think it's very important and there's lots of different ways to do this both more systematically or more anecdotally I do think that that's an area where there's a lot of interest at the GSD and you'll be able to do some of that work you can tell I spent a lot of life look at my life looking at how people use spaces of course it's important what do things they're all of food systems in creating healthy areas and how can planners and designers make a impact in this realm this really is an area of great current interest amongst many students and it's incredibly important it's a complicated issue and in some ways it's more an economic in and planning a design can only do so much because a lot of the issues to do with the food system are to do with sort of larger structural economic forces and some of the solutions people pick like making community garden and so on I think a fantastic for health in terms of forging social connections but the time they take and the sort of the amount of food they can produce often means that they're not so good for nutrition even if they're fantastic for helping you understand the importance of eating healthy food and to meet other people and so on and so what I'm going to say is that the food system is a very important topic there are areas where planners and designers can do things you know helping agriculture stay viable and so on but I think the food system is often a terrific mechanism for people finding other way to think about larger health issues so for a lot of people it's being the first step into thinking about this wider range of exposures connect that's not to say the food system is unimportant but it's a very complicated one to solve with planning and design solutions and I'd be totally happy to chat with you about that in the future with talks of a second wave of a potential second way of a cover 19 in the fall what would it look like for cities to be more resilient to prepared for this and how might they go about doing that particularly when the southern states seem to responded differently to this pandemic than their northern and western counterparts and I want to say that means some fantastic visualizations today in either the Washington Post or the New York Times showing these different responses how much people are moving around so this is definitely front and center I think the coming wave of carbon 19 is a little bit of planning and design issue but a lot of testing issue so the issue is if we suppress code of 1908 deal people are not building up immunity and so when you take off this suppression people will go out and they could catch it again and then you'll have another bump and so what will probably happen is there'll be some relaxation and then some pushing back and some relaxation and pushing back but we're doing that until we can get a vaccine so in a way and until and we have to do this sort of rigid social distancing until we can get enough testing so that we could test people isolate the ones with with coded 19 no the ones who had it so that they can go out and do things and not be affected so in many ways it's a it's a testing treatment kind of issue and hopefully the testing will kind of get into place you can I'm sort of hopeful seeing places like Singapore Hong Kong and South Korea that went through sort of sizing those and sort of have become more organized I can see other countries getting that kind of organisation hopefully sooner rather than yeah so the next one is I think we probably replay in our cities as a result of covert 19 we need to be careful even statistics a recent report out of Europe shows that if we have tested comprehensively fork over 19 the mortality rate would be quite low about 0.25 percent 0.5% you know this is because it depends on you know you count as having covered 19 the deaths due to heart disease the nutrition problems are much higher as I showed you in the in the earlier slide and that's we're closing off parks and opportunities for physical activity seems I'm running in the light of these statistics can you address this so this is a complicated issue at the moment we have a pandemic that's very infectious that many countries are not yet prepared for because for various reasons they're not yet prepared so at the moment we're doing intense social distancing to buy time to go to the take place where we can test and trace and isolate those who are really at risk and sort of start to get back to the new normal I too am worried about things like closing off parks and people not being able to get out and about it is a very difficult thing and it's in part a reaction to say groups of people who have used the pox and not being appropriately socially distanced I think I'm hoping that this extreme reaction in many places and I'm frustrated whether where the rules are really strict now is a short term so that people can sort of we can get to a stage where we can start to to relax and let people really understand the seriousness and when use parks and so on in a responsible manner so I totally agree we don't have to redesign the places for Koba 19 totally we do have to change the way using both in the short term and maybe there will be some change in a long term how do you think the impact on education caused by covered 19 will affect the future it is an issue that it depends what I would I do want to say is it will really depend on the level of education and and the character the resources of families what it's doing is its putting families with more resources technological resources educational resources it's tough if you've got kids but for those who don't have have those resources it's even tougher so keeping kids out of school as a problem however if it doesn't go on for so long things can get made up in the longer term I think that in the higher ed level we're more capable of moving to a virtual system although certainly in places not like Harvard where people very very few resources this is a problem I think that as long as it doesn't go on for way too long the impact on education will not be so so much actually I anyway I shouldn't have answered that I do have some opinions but it is less about my area of expertise in health so I'm quite happy to be proven and you have some evidence that would change that so how will planners and designers we're actually we're down to about five minutes to go but I think I can answer a few of those so how will planners and designers get along with governmental policies to move society think about healthy environments and models how will they cooperate it's a little complicated I just think that planners and designers could take advantage of this moment when governments are interested in health and and and really sort of use the power we have to kind of visualize a better future with planners that sort with words and charts and graphs but with designers it's with kind of imagery although planters use imagery too but anyway we have a way of visualizing the future that could be quite compelling in helping governments in helping us find a place at the table in thinking about a healthier future another question is about is about how planners and designers thinking about the health impacts of climate change I think that that's actually quite important and many people are everything from sort of displacement and disruption with disasters - so there's long term sort of slow crises like increasing health increasing drought there will be some places that will need to be moved Rick pizer professor Peyser and I are starting to look a bit at that planned retreat from floods from droughts and so on and what the lessons may be from the history of model communities but we just want very many people for whom this is an important issue so I think that's definitely something where people are thinking about it and I just think there's so many that it's hard to come up with one example I am conscious that we've got about five years ago oh and there are just so many questions I may not be able to to answer them all so I think I'm just going to try and pick a couple more so one of them is asking how open plan is and I would hope we talk about designers too can become activists for the importance of health and human ism in urban landscapes I I actually think it's a continuation of my last answer I think what we have is an ability to help people imagine the future and also I think that we have an ability to talk across some disciplines you know some of us are better at it than others but that way of managing to convene and visualize that's that's a very important set of skills in helping move towards a healthier environment and it's not a set of skills that everyone has and so I actually if that's my my shortest one oh and I think the other thing is the good thing that that health does is to really help focus on vulnerable people and how important is sort of an equity perspective is and so I think that the health perspective health is sort of something everyone likes but it's also deeply about equity and it can allow a more activist stance just intrinsically um probably Altec to war so someone asked me will planners and designers have to start to choose health over sustainability for instance will people leave mass transit certainly if you look at the current stats they're way down or could could we have higher building emissions because of all the activities we have to do at home and maybe the largest spaces we have to have for social distancing and so on these are real dilemmas and they sort of like some of the dilemmas one has with human health and climate change over heat and so on um I think it's not clear yet and I do think there might be ways to to harness changes that are already happening and say the transportation system or disorder and building systems although I'm not as much a building expert to try and come up with sort of like a third way so I think about it if I actually think people will get back to public transit and like in Singapore and in South Korea and Hong Kong they'll just be very good at responding to problems when they come along but in some places like the US when in in many places transit is not so popular it might be sort of difficult and so there could be ways in which this is a way of channeling people into bikes this is thinking about more energy-efficient other vehicles it's thinking about do people actually have to move around so much could we have a very equitable infrastructure like a national or international internet kind of policy so that so that we can actually say that we don't need to use mass transit as much and can could sort of move around virtually of course some people have to do it but that could sort of spread things out so I do think that it's a time for imagination there are lots of new technologies and transportation coming through there's also the ability to sort of use the bicycle as a way of kind of reaching distances that are too long for the pedestrian so I just think that that it's a moment to think very carefully rather than and and help frame the debate so that people don't immediately think we have to go to an automobile particularly a very fuel inefficient automobile but they think through a number of other strategies so I think that there's a way of doing that but it requires planners and designers to be quite sophisticated and really be able to understand the potential unintended consequences that could occur now I am sorry I have gotten to the I think this is the end I must Olivia expert and I can see I said there'll be a question coming up but I'm we're at 8 and I think I need to respect everyone's time and finish I'll talk with everyone about what we can do about these other questions and then maybe a way to do a little chat about it later I want to really thank you and say that there is a terrific day of programming tomorrow everyone at the GSD is really looking forward to having folks at the open house and we're looking forward to meeting you so thanks so much for coming and see you again at open house tomorrow

Channel: Harvard GSD

Views: 6,855

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: gsd

Id: ggzcMF7zako

Length: 84min 53sec (5093 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 03 2020