Public health and urban planning must work together to solve multifaceted modern problems.

The public health challenges we face today cannot be solved with unilateral solutions. They require a multidisciplinary approach to address all the different facets that contribute to them. Obesity, for example, is a health problem closely linked with lifestyle. In order to solve it experts who understand the physical and nutritional requirements for a healthy weight must work together with experts who understand how to encourage people to meet these requirements. Public health experts and urban planners are the ideal team to match this description – public health experts tell us one of the causes of obesity is that we’ve stopped walking, and urban planners tell us how to build communities that will get people walking again. 

This is of course an oversimplification of a complex issue, but the basic concept holds true. As Northridge and Sclar put it in a 2003 article in the American Public Health Journal, “urban planners apply the knowledge of social science and urban design at the intersection at which the physical environment meets the social environment.” This intersection is often where the root of modern health issues is to be found, and without addressing the environmental factors in disease and overall wellbeing we will not be able to make lasting improvements.

This collaborative approach is even more necessary in the developing world, where megacities are growing in number rapidly. As housing needs increase exponentially urban planners’ ability to design sufficient, safe residential structures will have lasting impacts on the health of the future generations of children that will grow up there. Even in the United States unsuitable building materials has been linked to increased rates of asthma among children in low-income neighborhoods of New York, highlighting the importance of building thoughtfully and with an eye to potential health impacts. (Northridge and Sclar, 2003).