Alessandro Filla Rosaneli e Dalit Shach-Pinsly: We turn now in to relation with Health. Closer to your present work. We have one general question, could you make some comments about the relationship between the urban form and human behavior? What are the limitations and potentialities of this approach for the Urban Design?

Anne Vernez Moudon: What we talked about until now was more theoretical and methodological, relating psychological, social, political processes to urban form. Now you are talking about behavior and environment. People have cautioned about this particular field of research, calling it physical determinism, where certain forms are believed to make people behave in certain ways. We know by now that there are definite co-adaptation processes between urban form and behavior. At a simple level, some people might put a king-size bed in a small bedroom, but most would not. They would look for a larger bedroom for this type of bed. Fewer people will walk if there are no sidewalks. Most but not all people will walk on a sidewalk. The environment/behavior relationship is not one to one and it is not entirely predictable. Work in urban form, building form and human behavior because will be useful to designers, as we aim for “making good places”. Environment behavior research can greatly help in relating spaces to their known affordances and hence would make designers’ work be more precise in projecting possible uses of space. We need more work on urban form and human behavior. To conclude about urban form and behavior, the more we know about it the better are we as designers.

AFR / DSP: Basically, what are the possible effects of the urban form in people’s health? In what measure are the socio-cultural factors important?

AVM: This is an interesting question, because going backward in time, the reason why I have done all this work, first with the transportation and now with the public health sectors, is because these fields open up the only mechanisms available through which you could study aspects of behavior and urban form. For example, I have student interested in the relationship between crime and urban form. There is a great difficulty to find support for that kind of research, except in the implications of this subject matter for human health. My focus on transportation and health has led to taking a practical view of behavior. I found out that people are interested in the effects of environment or urban form on certain behaviors—such as walking, using public transport, accessing certain types of foods, etc.  The behaviors studied are those that affect transportation or public health policies, and the research results lead to new ways of thinking about and regulating urban form.

AFR / DSP: You have chosen these two topics because the Americans are very concern about transportation and health. So you relate two American worries…

AVM: You are right, but I think the relationship between health and environment is now debated though out the world. The health issues related cities have changed. More than 100 years ago, these issues focused on the dense living conditions in urban centers and their implications for the spread of infectious diseases. People thought that infection was carried through air, which lead to concerns about overcrowding. These concerns eventually supported the development of low density suburbs, and the partial flight out of cities in the US and parts of the western world. Today’s, ironically, the overdependence on automobile travel, which was fueled by the low density suburban forms, is leading to the next health issue, which is physical inactivity! We worry less about the effects of high density living on health, and overcrowding only seems to be an issue in refugees camps, but not in the formal neighborhoods of China, South East Asia, Korea, etc., where people live in environments that are denser than those of US or European cities in the 19 century.

Now the issue of concern is with chronic diseases associated with physical inactivity and overweight or obesity. The overconsumption of cheap sugar and fat and sedentary life styles are linked to increases in cardio-vascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and various forms of cancers. Over-dependence on individual motorized transport and lack of access to healthy foods are the two aspects of behavior that seem to be influenced by contemporary urban forms. Other disorders, such as autism, are believed to be exacerbated by pollutants in the environment. Exposure to such pollutants is high in many cities. So not only the built environment but the air and water of cities affect our health.

Transport in cities seems to be a significant barrier to healthy living for the population: it affects how sedentary people are and it generates the largest portion of environmental pollutants. We know that transportation systems are closely linked to urban form, so research is important to find out how we can shape our cities to decrease the use of current transportation systems and to promote healthy behaviors.

Health research uses techniques in epidemiology that aim to understand how individual behavior leads to population-wide health problems. The research includes consideration of the social and the economic environments in determining behavior, adding to them the possible effects of the physical environment. The physical environment has some effect on how active people are, explaining about 10% of behaviors.

AFR / DSP: We would like that you explain the importance of walking in the city and ask again, could a good city be a place where everybody can walk to reach their basic needs?

AVM: Again, a good city is where people can live quality life. This is a little bit vague, isn’t it? But there are ways to measure how good a city is. A good city is where people can walk, but there is more to that in a good city isn’t there?

I got interested in walking much before walking was a fashionable topic in transportation and health. Back in the 1980s in urban design and maybe even Lynch said it, we realized that one measure of a good place was that  of people being able to walk around. Actually, William White wasn’t so much talking about people walking than about people “being” around. No one around meant that the place was not a good place. I got into the social aspects of walking first. These aspects have taken a secondary importance in the more focused context of research in transportation and health, but they should not be forgotten!

On the other hand, it is amazingly refreshing to see that a lot of cities around the world are working to make bicycling as the main type of urban transportation. This is very hopeful because the distances are so short and it is so easy to get around by bike, if only cars are tamed and cycling on the roadway becomes safe.

AFR / DSP: Now cities have started to develop bicycle routs, which is very difficult to insert it in an existing city…

AVM: Yet they can find plenty of space for cars! I don’t buy this difficulty thing. I think it’s about priorities! With global warming and health questions, bicycling is becoming an obvious mode of transport to cover short distances. You go much faster by bike than by walking. It is good from the clean air and water and the physical activity perspective. It may be less good for social encounters, because cyclists are less likely than pedestrians to stop and talk with people.