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Public Health and the Built Environment
"We shape our dwellings. Thereafter, they shape us." — Winston Churchill
by Connie Uetrecht, Executive Director, OPHA
It's a truth that has been universally acknowledged for some time. The buildings we live in and the design of the communities in which those buildings are placed, are key determinants of our collective health and well-being. In recent years, public concerns about obesity, heart health, and other chronic conditions have given new impetus to the movement to determine the role that the built environment plays in shaping our collective health.
OPHA has already established a solid track record of activity in tracking environmental health issues. For example, at our Annual Conference in 2006, Dr. Lawrence Frank delivered a keynote presentation titled The Built Environment: Enabler or Disabler of Health Promotion and Environmentally Sustainable Behaviour. Our Heart Health Resource Centre also held a workshop on the built environment in 2006 and has posted several resources on the subject on its web site .
But in recent weeks we have established a connection with the Ontario Professional Planners Institute (OPPI) — the recognized voice of the province's planning professionals whose 2700 members are employed by private industry, governments and academic institutions — to discuss ways in which both organizations can explore our mutual interest in creating and fostering healthy communities throughout Ontario.
In common with OPHA, members of OPPI are committed to creating and fostering healthy communities throughout Ontario because they recognize how land use planning decisions shape us — obesity, mental health, heart disease, social isolation, nutritionm and air quality. OPPI has prepared a position paper focusing on healthy sustainable communities. It emphasizes the importance of urban design, active transportation, and green infrastructure and explores the links between public health and land use planning.
OPPI says one of its highest priorities is to "refine and verify the results of the public health work on the relationship between urban sprawl and poor health outcomes, including obesity to better develop land use and transportation design responses to Ontario's unique built environment."
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