Designing healthy communities

"Designing Healthy Communities is Dr. Richard J. Jackson's call to action for all of us concerned with the health trends that are beginning to overwhelm the country. It is a companion book for the upcoming special PBS broadcast that describes how the design of the built environment impacts our health, with an additional emphasis on the inequities of social and environmental justice. In this book, Dr. Jackson explores how the built environment has contributed to the fact that two-thirds of Americans are overweight, 70 million are obese and many suffer from an array of other chronic but preventable diseases. The book and series looks upstream at the root causes of our malaise, and highlights actionable best practices based on real people with real solutions. Public health has traditionally associated the built environment with issues such as poor sanitation, lead paint poisoning and children, workplace safety, fire codes and access for persons with disabilities. We now realize that how we design the built environment may hold tremendous potential for addressing