Designing Healthy Communities: Volume 1

Hosted by celebrated author and teacher Richard Jackson, MD, MPH, this documentary makes the case that the rapidly deteriorating public health of our citizens is linked directly to nearly half-a-century of bad design decisions, now frozen in concrete. Each of the segments included in this set looks at the different impacts our built environment in urban and suburban areas has on key public health issues-obesity, diabetes, heart disease, asthma, cancer, and even depression. Dr. Jackson links bad community design with burgeoning health costs and analyzes what ordinary citizens, including many young people, are trying to do about this urgent crisis. Dr. Jackson inhabits the frontier between public health and urban planning and offers us hopeful examples of innovative transformations.