Is your neighbourhood making you sick?

Location, location, location. Where you live has a great impact on your daily life. From transportation infrastructure, provision of utilities, emergency services to even garbage pick-up. And while not as obvious, your neighbourhood design also plays a role in your health and can impact your risk for diseases such as diabetes and heart disease. So is your neighbourhood making you sick?

The Built Environment

In recent decades there has been growing interest in what is termed the built environment and how it relates to health and health behaviours. The built environment refers the human-made infrastructure in which we live. This includes buildings, road networks and park space. 

We can clearly see how this if we picture living close to a large industrial complex spewing out smog and other pollutants. Or if you live by a house with parties every night making it hard to sleep. But what about sidewalks, though? Does it matter if the streets are lined with trees? Do they have streetlights? Are the streets connected making it easy to get from A to B? Is there a lot of traffic?

When it comes to neighbourhoods, how they’re designed can play a big role in how much activity you get, what you eat, how much stress you have and even what you breathe in. This in turn can affect your health many years later.

How Your Neighbourhood Affects Your Behaviours

People living in neighbourhoods with sidewalks, low crime, and parks and community centres are more active. Likewise, having a community with a grid-like street network gets more people walking than communities with meandering streets and dead ends. These neighbourhoods with row upon row of houses may look ideal but they’re not good for your health. Going anywhere usually requires getting in a car. It increases your sitting, which can be bad for your health. And those hours in the car add up; each one hour of commuting is associated with a 6% greater risk for obesity.

However, if you have shops, places of work, schools, etc. close to you, you’re more likely to walk or bike to them. It should come as no surprise that people who walk or bike (or scooter, skateboard) to commute or run errands are more likely to be active. And they’re also less likely to be obese and have type 2 diabetes.

Together these things form what is called ‘walkability’. You can find out the walkability of anywhere in Australia, Canada and the USA by going to the Walk Score website. For example, the Walk Score for Manhattan is 99 out of a 100. And not surprisingly, 78% of households don’t have a car. Compare that to Scottsdale, Arizona which has a walk score of 32 and only 4% of households don’t own a car.

When it comes to diet, what food is offered in your neighbourhood may have a role in what you eat. Our work has shown that living in areas with more fast food restaurants increases one’s chances for having obesity. Together, how your neighbourhood is set up can affect your chances of getting obesity, type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

Beyond Behaviours

It’s not just through behaviours that neighbourhoods affect your health. Living near a highway and major street can increase your chances for heart and lung diseases, and even dementia. This is due to the pollution from cars, as well as the noise coming from busy streets. This noise does more than keep you up at night, it can lead to stress and activate hormones that increase risk for heart disease.

Greenspace such as trees, parks and fields have been found to be associated with improved health. Trees in a neighbourhood can reduce air pollution and (possibly noise pollution), as well as provide shade form the sun and lower the temperature at street level. Greenspace is also associated with better mental health and reduced mental illness.

Cities Are Now Focusing on Health

With this information in hand, many cities throughout the world are changing how they approach their design. Instead of making cities with the car in mind, cities are putting people, and their health, first. Starting as early as 1974, Bogota, Colombia’s Ciclovia closes off dozens of miles of roads every Sunday morning to allow pedestrians and cyclists to take over, leading to a carnival atmosphere of physical activity. Many other cities have followed suit with their own Ciclovia.

Cities such as Hong Kong, Olso, London and New York City are undergoing initiatives such from putting in more walking and biking infrastructure to banning cars outright in certain parts of the cities. And Paris has recently undergone one of the most remarkable transformations in just a short span from a car dominant city to a bike dominant one. One of the main reasons cities undertake this transformation is to reduce pollution and traffic congestion. In addition, it costs less for cities to maintain infrastructure for active transportation (bikes, scooters, walking) than for personal vehicles.

In Denmark, the bicycle is king. People can move faster cycling through the city than in a car. And because of the infrastructure is cheaper for bike paths than roads, plus the healthcare savings of being active, the city of Copenhagen has found the cost to society of travelling by car is six times more than by bicycle.

Newer cities and neighbourhoods can even go beyond what older cities can do as they’re stating from a clean slate. These cities are being designed to allow people to live, work and play in the same area. In China, outside of Chengdu a neighbourhood is being developed so that everything is within a 15 minute walk.

All of us want to do things the easiest and fastest way, and often means using motorized transportation or eating convenience foods. While we all bear some individual responsibility in our health and our lifestyle habits, if we live in an area that makes it hard to be active, eat nutritious foods and breath clean air, realizing our potential to be healthy will be practically impossible.

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