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Does Sprawl Make Us Fat?
Ant writes "A Science News article talks about the relationship between city design and health. New cross-disciplinary research is exploring whether urban sprawl makes us soft, or whether people who don't like to exercise move to the sprawling suburbs, or some combination of both." From the article: "So far, the dozen strong studies that have probed the relationships among the urban environment, people's activity, and obesity have all agreed, says Ewing. 'Sprawling places have heavier people... There is evidence of an association between the built environment and obesity.' ... However, University of Toronto economist Matthew Turner charges that 'a lot of people out there don't like urban sprawl, and those people are trying to hijack the obesity epidemic to further the smart-growth agenda [and] change how cities look.' ... 'We're the only ones that have tried to distinguish between causation and sorting... and we find that it's sorting,' [says Turner]. 'The available facts do not support the conclusion that sprawling neighborhoods cause weight gain.'"
There, I just made a strong case why sprawl is bad, without resorting to being a health Nazi.
Obesity in suburbanites is just an additional reason why sprawl is bad, not the reason.
In short: put up tolls heavy enough to clear congestion. This creates the financial incentives necessary for market-driven mass transit
Market driven mass transit has been successful nowhere. Transport infrastucture is (or should be) a government problem.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Sprawl didn't make me fat. Eating more calories than I burn made me fat.
"It's too bad stupidity isn't painful." - A. S. LaVey
I don't know if all the US is like this, but every spawling area that I've been to in the US is insanely pedestrian unfriendly. There are very few crosswalks on major roads, forcing people to dash across, typically to an offramp that has "no pedestrians" signs on it, even though there is no pedestrian access ways nearby. I've never seen a foot bridge over a major road, nor a tunnel. In fact, I've been to parts of the US which don't provide ANY pedestrian access to a mall. I guess they figure that if you don't drive a car then you don't have enough money to shop in their store.
Compare this to Australia and Europe, where there is as much urban sprawl as the worst parts of the US but every road has a sidewalk, every set of lights has a crosswalk, and foot bridges and tunnels are commonplace. This results in two things: getting in your car to go get milk and bread is considered lazy and, as a result, there's lots of small "corner stores" to get milk and bread almost everywhere people live. Kids walk to school, and/or catch public transport. And seeing as there are lots of people on the streets, street crime is virtually unheard of - it's a lot easier to mug someone if the only people nearby are in cars with their windows rolled up because they're afraid of street crime.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Until we have so much technology that we can reshape ourselves at will!
How we know is more important than what we know.
Very well put. And behind this study is similar reasoning to what you provide; mixed-use communities provide more opportunities to walk someplace.
On a personal note, I gained a lot of weight after moving to the burbs. Living in NYC and walking up 3 flights of stairs kept me more active. Even in an elevator building, I did a lot of walking around with groceries.
Unfortunately in America, "sprawl" is a term that has been continuously co-opted, in many parts of America, to mean "let's have large lot sizes to retain our rural character" which of course *creates* sprawl. Other parts of the country, e.g. California, which have huge amounts of building purely residential developments on empty hills, have other problems. Namely, gated-community-type shit, which dictate all houses have to look alike and no commercial development. This demands that you drive a few miles to a strip mall just to buy milk.
Americans need to rethink development in a very serious way.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
Losing weight is incredibly simple. The entire topic can be covered in 4 words: Eat less, exercise more.
Not surprisingly people become ugly fat porkers because they don't follow that simple four word formula.
(This isn't self-righteous spew -- I need to lose about 20kg to be at my optimal weight. At least I know the only person I have to blame is myself.)
Some people are like slinkies--basically useless but they bring a smile to your face when pushed down the stairs.
Spawl != Less walking opportunities. That's your social conditioning talking. You think Spawl -> pedestrian unfriendliness and pedestrian unfriendliness == people afraid to walk.
Nope, I'm not thinking that at all. You're thinking I'm American, but I'm not.
Compare say the sprawled Australian city of Sydney and the non-sprawled European city of Amsterdam. Both are pedestrian friendly and people would not be afraid to walk in either.
In Sydney, the majority of people drive to work, drive to the Supermarket once a week, drive to their local shopping center for entertainment, etc. In Amsterdam however, there is much less sprawl and much better public transport. People are forced to walk to the tram/train before going to work, entertainment, etc.
Have you ever lived in a non-sprawled city? I've lived in both and believe me, it's not about pedestrian unfriendliness, but about easy accessability to work / entertainment / shops (beyond your local expensive milk-bar) / schools / etc by pedestrians.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
New urbanism is probably a step in the right direction, but it appears to be missing critical elements of successful older neighborhoods. Jane Jacobs emphasizes the need for buildings of various ages (and which can be repurposed as the community changes): the book shops in old houses, funky music stores, arty cafes and so on that make for a hip urban environment often can't afford the rent of flashy new buildings. It strikes me as strange that a society which so strongly rejected the idea (if not always the practice) of central planning during the Cold War prides itself in its "master planned" communities."
Furthermore, a vibrant community requires more than just residential and commercial uses. The plans I have seen often look attractive, but on closer examination bear a striking resemblance to malls turned inside out and mixed with housing. They may have greenspace or plazas, but like the landscaping around so many highrises these are often private or effectively gated. The real test of urban spaces is whether they are used. Once built, the pretty designs of planners are often lonely places. On the other hand, sometimes the least attractive spaces are great successes (think of skate parks).
So I don't really think it's ironic the planners of gated communities are building new urban spaces which can also be privatized and desolate; they're simply taking their old approach of centralization and control and dressing it up in new clothes.
On the other hand, it's not all their fault. Developers who do want to take a risk often run into senseless rules regulating every detail of their communities, such as requirements for streets big enough for fire trucks to turn around in to minimum parking spaces, wide streets, huge setbacks in front of buildings, low densities, and so forth. Sprawl has been institutionalized in North America, and bureaucracy has been slow to change. (And I suspect rather than releasing their grip they're probably just making up new rules.)
The disorders you linked to have an overall incidence on the order of 1 in 100000 people. The rate of being fat (in the USA) is 2 in 5. You do the math.
You are comparing apples and oranges. There are places in Colorado which are way more advanced the UK as far as pedestrianisation and cycling facilities.
Boulder and surrounding areas is a prime example - you can get on foot from anywhere to anywhere (there are others as well). Most of the city center is a huge no-car zone which is something that I did not expect to find outside Europe. Once you get outside the no-car area you still have cycling lanes on every road as well as cycle paths which combine into a huge cycling network that spans at least several miles out and penetrates into the neighbouring suburbia and business parks. All buses carry cycle racks and the driver is happy to pick up your cycle and drop it off.
After suffering from the half hearted assinine approach to cycling in Cambridge which is supposed to be the "greenest" and "cycliest" UK city, I felt like I have died and went to heaven. It simply felt unreal. No deliberate obstructions on the cycle paths with bollards. Sufficient and properly positioned car parking so that people are not forced to park on top of cycle lanes. All cycle paths are maintained and have proper visibility. Compared to that in Cambridge the average visibility on most cycle paths drops to under 10m in mid-summer due to the city council not giving a flying fuck about cutting any branches and doing any maintenance.
USA is not a sprawl all over and some portions of the sprawl are built in a healthier and more cycling/pedestrian friendly manner than anything in the UK and possibly most of EU. When looking at Boulder, the only comparison I can think of are the richer neighbourhoods in Finland (like Espoo). And even Espoo does not have a sky-run/cycle network all over like Boulder. It is confined to the center and the area where it connects to the mainland.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
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In the US, local commerce is rigidly controlled through zoning laws. It would be nice to have a neighborhood store, or set of shops, etc, but most local governments don't allow mixing commercial areas with residential.
It's simply against the law.
Land of the free, my ass.
In the U.S. at least. We're afraid of crime and/or minorities and so we move further out to be away from them. We're afraid our kids will be abducted or abused so we drive them to the bus stop so that they can go to school, even though the bus stop is just a few blocks from our home. We then sit there with the engine running and the doors locked until the kids board the bus, and drive back home. Kids can't be allowed to play on their own, we have to constantly watch them if they want to go to the park. But thanks to our commute back and forth to work we don't have time to actually supervise them. So we forbid them to go out after school and leave them at home in front of the television or with their game consoles. Not to mention their sugary snacks and processed foods. Commuting parents often don't have time to actually prepare food from scratch.
Fear is the driving force behind sprawl, and fear sets the pattern for our sedentary lifestyles. It's our fears that make us fat.
As a culture we need to get over it.
Where I come from being a huge lard ass because you
drive everywhere and never carry anything exposes you
to far more ridicule than carrying a bag around does.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
Reasonable choice you're making between fat and happy or thin and unhappy, but let's talk again 10 years later when your joints never stop hurting, your diabetes kicks in and your heart becomes unwilling to pump blood through all that mass all day long, i.e., when fat suddenly doesn't equate happy any longer.
;)
Be sure to get some good health insurance for the time being. Life will get expensive then. No offense.
A World in a Grain of Sand / Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Infinity in the Palm of your Hand / And Eternity in an Hour.
Boulder is also a small, extremely wealthy community. This is not to discount what they've accomplsihed there. Attitude does make a difference in remaking a landscape, but not as much as wealth.
In a way, it reminds me of the John Christopher novel The Guardians. Most people are shovelled into sprawling "conurbs", where everything is engineered around efficiently supporting vast number of powerless people. The elite live in the "Country", using their wealth to live, superficially, as if they were in the nineteenth century. They helicopter from their jobs as adminstrators and professionals in the conurbs to hidden landing pads, then ride their horses back home.
What Christopher was writing about back in 1970 was overpopulation, but it also was about what we'd call today "urban sprawl". The logical end point of sprawl is to divide people into two classes, those who must live with it, and those who can evade its consequences by creating artificial enviornments where the logical consequences of sprawl are externalized.
So, in poor communities, you drive to the WalMart to buy things. In wealthy communities, we build replicas of the old village square or high street.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.