Changing Places: The Science and Art of New Urban Planning

When the effort to travel to transit seems daunting because of distance or fear of danger, people will default to the easier decision to drive. The physical environment goes hand in hand with people’s perceptions of the difficulty of tasks. Research shows people are more willing to walk and use transit when streets are more connected, block lengths

A place-based intervention that leads to the greater desirability of a place—such as the expansion of transit, the greening of small park spaces, or the creating of a business improvement district—could also foster new housing or condominium developments, which would then increase the population in an area. Yet if an area doesn’t have a school syst

CPTED offers a recipe for reducing crime by shifting the availability of easy targets. This does not mean that an offender’s motivations to commit crime have been erased; it simply means that some offenses won’t occur in given areas because offenders either choose to go elsewhere or to not commit the crime. If one assumes that not all crimes are ea

Proponents of parks, like the advocates of urban planning, struggled to articulate a rationale for what was a rather novel political idea in the laissez-faire era of politics in the United States. Developing parks required all the tactics we currently use in our modern urban planning apparatus: the condemnation and taking of private property for pu

Note that this model does not address the fundamental motivations behind crime; rather, it tries to make crimes inconvenient. The idea is that there are easier targets elsewhere. Some have criticized CPTED because it does not address underlying root causes that make someone likely to commit a crime in the first place. This misses the point. CPTED i

The results from the MTO housing mobility experiment showed mixed results. In general, adults reported better measures of happiness and improvements in physical health and perceptions of safety.29 Adult women that moved to the low-poverty neighborhoods were also significantly less likely to become morbidly obese and have signs of diabetes.30 For gi

As a third cardinal feature, place-based changes must be sustainable, without the need for constant and conscious maintenance of positive behavior or the perpetual persuasion of individuals to be safe and healthy. Employee exercise programs, for example, require employees that are committed to volunteering and maintaining their involvement in the p

The public health challenge of poor-quality housing is not just a problem of the developing world. Exposures to unhealthy housing conditions are also common in poorly constructed and maintained housing stock in the United States and other developed countries. Exposure to lead, for example, has harmful consequences on brain development and is most l

In the early 1990s, a long-simmering urban planning movement finally found its legs. For thirty years, a small group of urban advocates had grown weary of merely expounding the virtues contained in Jacobs’s book and decided to get organized. In 1993, the Congress for New Urbanism (CNU) had their first meeting. Its founders included the influential

The “popsicle test” is a great example of a health-and-place-focused metric. The basic metric measures the ability of an eight-year old child to walk safely to buy a Popsicle in their neighborhood and return before it melts. This concept captures many of the elements of a healthy place, including walkability, pedestrian safety, a connected communit