What Does a Healthy City Look Like?

Community Design with Caroline Dwyer

Public health challenges permeate our cities. From streets that discourage pedestrian activity, to inaccessible healthcare facilities, to dangerous intersections, the negative impacts of the built environment erode a strong sense of place and harm our physical and mental well-being.

However, cities also inspire public health innovations. Attempts to fight infectious disease, pollution, and social inequities led to advancements in public sanitation, water systems, and improved public health. There is a clear consensus that cities can facilitate improved quality of life and healthy communities with the right planning and policies. For example, accessible public green spaces and safe, walkable neighborhoods are both associated with reduced stress and mental illness, increased physical and social activity, and improved attention span.

As the global migration to urban areas continues, how can city planners support healthy communities? How can we plan and implement transportation systems, built environments, and public spaces that improve health for all residents?

These questions are at the forefront of the minds of many planners, including Renaissance Planning Project Manager Caroline Dwyer. Caroline and her co-authors explore the relationships between city planning and public health in, “Validating a comprehensive plan scoring system for healthy community design in League City, Texas,” included in Urban Design and Human Flourishing published in March 2021. As the book chapter describes, city planning, urban design, and public health became increasingly disassociated as epidemiological focus shifted from infectious diseases (such as cholera, typhoid, and flu) to chronic diseases (like heart disease) during the 20th century.

Reconnecting Public Health and City Planning

At the dawn of the 21st century, new connections forged between public health and city planning and design. Technological advances have allowed the health impacts of the built environment to be explored and quantified in new ways and new programs, groups, and organizations are emerging in response. One example is Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Healthy Places for Healthy People technical assistance program, managed by the Office of Community Revitalization (OCR). This program builds community capacity, helping to leverage health care anchor organizations and institutions in creating walkable, lively downtowns and neighborhoods and improving community health.  

“Validating a comprehensive plan scoring system for healthy community design in League City, Texas,” posits those comprehensive plans—the guides that provide long-term visions for a city or county’s development and growth—play an instrumental role in determining future built, natural, and social environments and, as such, facilitate vibrant and healthy communities. For example, a comprehensive plan that recognizes health inequities and promotes mixed-use, compact development meets an essential prerequisite toward building a dynamic, health-centric city.

To quantitively explore the inextricable connections between public health and city planning, the article’s authors used the Healthy Living and Active Design Scorecard (developed by Maiden et. al.) to assess the comprehensive plan of League City, Texas, in suburban Houston. The scorecard features three categories:

1.      Overall plan, vision, and strategy: Does the plan’s guiding principles address public health?

2.      Healthy living: Does the plan include goals, objectives, or actions related to healthy living, including mobility, exercise, food, and healthcare services?

3.      Active design: Does the plan support and recognize key features of healthy cities, such as mixed-use and compact development, repurposed older buildings, affordable housing, connectivity between developments, and transit-oriented development?

The resulting study is a fascinating examination of assessing a comprehensive plan’s likelihood in supporting a cohesive, healthy city. This type of proactive and critical self-evaluation of plans can help city officials and planners determine if their own plans contain the building blocks to improving community health. The Healthy and Active Living Design Scorecard also demonstrates the renewed interest in the city planning and public health relationship. At Renaissance Planning, we continue to  challenge ourselves to develop innovative tools deepening our ability to plan for and design healthy cities. And through this innovation we are helping create the next generation of cities that work.

For more information on Caroline’s work, check out Urban Design and Human Flourishing here. You can connect with Caroline on Twitter @plan_splaining or on LinkedIn.

Caroline Dwyer's NPC21 Presentation: A Retrospective

On Friday May 7, 2021 Caroline Dwyer, AICP a project manager with Renaissance Planning moderated a session at the American Planning Association’s 2021 National Planning Conference (NPC21). Joined by Chanelle Nicole Frazier, Chloe Green, Daniel Besinaiz, and Monica Tibbits-Nutt, the session “Confront and Dismantle Discriminatory Workplace Practices” featured background information on ways discrimination is expressed in the workplace, the white, male-centric roots of accepted “professional norms,” and a question-and-answer session with the four panelists focused on their work identifying and breaking down racist, misogynistic, and anti-LGBTQ+ workplace practices.

Caroline designed the session to challenge attendees to think differently about the “norms” we accept and take for granted and to consider how Western, Euro-centric, gender binary norms impact the lives and careers of our non-Western, non-white, non-binary, non-straight peers and colleagues, in everything from hair styles, to clothes, to names, to the food you bring for lunch. For example, if you search the word “professional” in Google Image Search, you are primarily presented with white men and women with shiny, straight brown or blonde hair wearing business suits in conservative colors. But if you search the word “unprofessional” you will see more non-white people wearing bright colored clothes, head scarfs, natural hair styles, and other expressions of personality.

After discussing the roots and impacts of discriminatory professional norms, the session speakers issued a call to action to the over two hundred session attendees. Using the virtual conference’s chat function, session attendees (of culturally dominant groups) were asked to identify one action they would commit to taking, to expose and dismantle discrimination in their own workplaces or (for participants not identifying with culturally dominant groups) to name an action that they believe would be most impactful, that attendees could commit to taking.

Overall, attendees reported that the session was “informative,” “fantastic,” and “amazing.” Caroline is grateful to the panelists who shared their experiences and descriptions of the amazing work they are doing and to APA for hosting an exceptional virtual conference under challenging circumstances.  

Word on the Street: Caroline Dwyer on her presentation for NPC21

We’re thrilled that our own Caroline Dwyer, a project manager at Renaissance Planning, will be presenting a panel within the National Planning Conference 2021 (NPC21). Caroline shares her thoughts about the presentation below, with details about the presentation at the bottom. Thanks Caroline!

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On May 7, 2021 at 10 AM (Eastern) I will be moderating a live panel discussion at NPC21 called “Confront and Dismantle Discriminatory Workplace Practices,” presented in coordination with APA’s Career Center and sponsored by APA’s Women & Planning Division.  This session was originally scheduled to be presented at last year’s conference in Houston which, unfortunately,  did not take place as planned due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I’m excited that we’ve been given another opportunity to present this session as our discussion topic remains critically relevant.

 First off – full-disclosure – I’m ashamed to admit that I never considered how cis-gender, white dominant “professional norms” impact people of color and the LGBTQ+ community in the workplace. For those new to this topic “the narrative of white supremacy that underpins professionalism today, playing out in the hiring, firing, and day-to-day management of workplaces around the world… unfolds many ways: in white and Western standards of dress and hairstyle (straightened hair, suits but not saris, and burqa and beard bans in some countries); in speech, accent, word choice, and communication (never show emotion, must sound ‘American,’ and must speak white standard English); in scrutiny (black employees are monitored more closely and face more penalties as a result); and in attitudes toward timeliness and work style.”

 As a student and practitioner of urban planning, I am – of course - aware of the discriminatory practices that are literally baked into the bones of our communities. And as a planner, I am committed to exposing and dismantling these practices without question. But I will be the first to admit that – from my position of privilege (white, cis, educated, financially stable) – I never questioned the exclusive, discriminatory, and deeply damaging roots of the dominant professional norms.

 In 2018, I came across an article called “How Black Women Describe Navigating Race and Gender in the Workplace” by Maura Cheeks and published in the Harvard Business Review. Featuring interviews with ten women of color, this article is full of honest testimony that blew apart my ignorance and opened my eyes to the discrimination, racism, classism, and misogyny perpetuated by what are blithely accepted as professional norms. I’ve revisited, reread, shared, and discussed this article (and others like it) many times in the last four years; sometimes as a personal reminder and sometimes to facilitate understanding in other people (especially white women) like me.

 My awareness of this issue compels me to help others (like me) who are complicit in perpetuating white, western supremacist norms. The session I am moderating is both informational and a call to action. My co-panelists will be answering questions live and sharing their own professional experiences and session attendees will be asked to brainstorm solutions and commit to taking action in their own workplaces. My goal is to provide attendees with the knowledge (and a few useful tools) they need to question and help break down previously unchallenged standards of white, straight, western-dominant professionalism.

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Caroline’s presentation “Confront and Dismantle Discriminatory Workplace Practices” will be presented live at the American Planning Association annual conference NPC21 on May 7, 2021, 10 AM (eastern). Panelists include: Chloé Greene (Abt Associates; Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Associate); Monica Tibbits-Nutt (Executive Director of 128 Business Council; Vice-Chair, MBTA Fiscal and Management Control Board; Massachusetts Department of Transportation Board of Directors; Vice- President, Youth Engagement Planning (YEP!)); Daniel Besinaiz (Assistant Planner at Bossier City-Parish Metropolitan Planning Commission; Communications Co-Chair APA Latinos and Planning Division); and Chanelle Frazier (emerging planner and grant writer based in Houston, Texas; Director of Chapter Engagement APA Women and Planning Division). Learn more about Caroline here.

Making Data Visual: Video Q&A with Alex Bell on the Mobility Report Card

This is the kind of report card that I’m excited to see.

The interactive and highly visual data dashboards within the Mobility Report Card for the Durham-Chapel Hill-Carrboro (DCHC) regional MPO helps to clearly tell the story of multimodal transportation performance, reliability, and safety for the Triangle Region.

“This went from a large, complex dataset that was sitting on a shelf – in a thick paper report – to something that people can interact with” says Alex Bell, Project Manager and Technical Director for Renaissance Planning. “There are limited opportunities for innovation in the world of transportation performance metrics where the data and analysis methods are often highly codified.  But with the Mobility Report Card we were able to make the data visible, interactive, more accessible, and easily understandable to a wide range of real users and public groups – and the DCHC MPO were very happy as well.” 

Data around transportation systems are usually collected and synthesized into large paper reports that are often both difficult to understand and not easy to access by the general public. But this report – with its clear story map website, easily digestible chapters, and interactive data dashboards – provides clarity on the far side of complexity.  To learn more about this project visit the Mobility Report Card Project Page.

Watch the Q&A with Alex has he provides a guided tour of the Mobility Report Card.  I give it an A+.   

- By Asa Eslocker with Alex Bell

"This went from a large, complex dataset that was sitting on a shelf - in a thick paper report - to something that people can interact with" says Alex Bell, ...

Tampa Urban Planner Kohl Malo Passes AICP Exam

Renaissance would like to congratulate Kohl Malo — now, Kohl Malo AICP-C — for passing his AICP exam. Having joined Renaissance's Tampa office in May, Kohl is now set to acquire his full certification later this year.

Kohl successfully balanced a number of unexpected challenges as he took his exam. One was the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, which made in-person testing difficult. So, he opted for the newly available at-home testing option. Additionally, Kohl sat for the exam as Hurricane Eta rolled into the Tampa Bay region and left considerable flooding and damage just a few miles away. Luckily, the power and internet held on and he completed the exam successfully.

In preparation for the exam, Kohl dedicated four months studying an hour each day, although he increased studying in the weeks leading up to the exam. While Kohl utilized a number of study techniques such as study guides and presentations, he said the best preparation was working with the great planners right here at Renaissance.

"Studying NEPA is one thing on paper," said Kohl, "but seeing much more experienced planners handle it with ease made the practical part a lot easier."

Congrats to Kohl for achieving this major accomplishment in the urban planning community!