Rethinking cities for a healthy life
May 9, 2008 – Choosing where you live is not trivial. This choice has consequences for our health, according to experts who discussed ecohealth at the recent congress of the Association francophone pour le savoir (ACFAS), held in Quebec City from May 5 to 9, 2008.
Ecohealth is a new concept that integrates two poles: ecology and health. For several experts, it is to design the city and the suburbs according to the health of its inhabitants and that of the environment. They also focused on two closely related aspects of ecohealth: the means of transport and the place where one resides.
“Travel is increasing faster than the population,” emphasizes Louis Drouin, doctor specializing in public health and responsible for the urban environment and health sector at the Agence de la santé et des services sociaux de Montréal. “There have been about 40 more vehicles per year in the metropolitan area over the past five years,” he adds, recalling in the same breath that the use of public transport decreased by 000% from 7 to 1987.
Direct effects on health
Ecohealth This new concept takes into account the interactions between living organisms and the biophysical environment on the one hand, and social systems organized according to beliefs, modes of economic development and political decisions on the other, explains Marie Pierre Chevier, anthropologist. at the University of Montreal. Like the ecosystem of which a flower or an animal is a part, humans interact with their environment. In his case, the city, a “built” ecosystem, replaces the natural ecosystem. |
“The increase in road traffic increases road accidents and cardiorespiratory diseases due to air pollution. Motorized transport decreases active mobility, with consequences on obesity. They increase greenhouse gases and noise, ”says Louis Drouin. In addition, the phenomenon of heat islands – urban areas where the temperature is higher than elsewhere during the summer – is accentuated while the area of wooded areas has decreased by 18%, from 1998 to 2005, in the Montreal region. And wooded areas are becoming parking lots, roads and shopping centers, he laments.
Condemning the rarely questioned standard of automobile-centric urban development for the past 50 years, Louis Drouin is calling for a moratorium on the Land Use Planning and Development Act. In order to reduce the number of vehicles on the road, it calls for the creation of public transport “punctual, safe, accessible, fast, with reserved lanes as in Paris and Strasbourg. “
“It’s time to redensify neighborhoods to locate popular destinations within walking distance,” says Louis Drouin. He suggests taking advantage of the fact that aging infrastructure will have to be renewed, to rethink the city and the suburbs.
The Bois-Francs district: disappointing results
The success of a dense neighborhood that promotes active travel (cycling and walking) and public transport is not so simple, reports architect Carole Després, professor at Laval University and co-founder of the Interdisciplinary Research Group on suburbs. The Bois-Francs district, in the Montreal borough of Saint-Laurent, designed according to these new urban planning rules, is a good illustration of this. Its 6 inhabitants enjoy easy access to a bicycle path, metro, commuter train and buses. A large park occupies 000% of the area of the district, the density of which is 20 dwellings per hectare.
Even if this district is recognized by the American organization Congress for the New Urbanism, the results of a recent study1 made by a researcher from the National Institute for Scientific Research (INRS) are not rosy, concedes Carole Després. “We would have liked to say that the residents of the Bois-Francs district walk more and that they take the car less than those of the rest of the borough, but it is the opposite. Worse yet, they beat the average car use of metro area residents for travel for recreation and education.
How to explain these results? Time management, she takes the risk. “Maybe we have a child who is enrolled in a sports-study program on a shore and that we have a sick parent to take care of, or that we have just changed jobs who are no longer far … There are a host of reasons why people now live not at the neighborhood level, but at the metropolitan scale. “The concepts of new town planning are, according to her,” based on a kind of nostalgia for the neighborhood of yesteryear where you walked to go to school. People’s behavior today is more complex. “
It’s not better in the suburbs
The transformation of the suburbs is necessary for better health, according to urban planner Gérard Beaudet, director of the Urbanism Institute of the University of Montreal. “More than half of Americans today live in the suburbs,” he reports. However, it is one of the societies among the developed countries which presents the most important health problems. So, we can see that the suburbs were not that miracle solution in which everyone believed for a long time ”. We are looking for solutions not only for the quality of life and mobility problems of people, but also for health, continues Gérard Beaudet. “Several indicators show that, while living in a poor neighborhood is not an advantage, living in richer neighborhoods is not necessarily the ultimate solution,” he argues.
Mélanie Robitaille – PasseportSanté.net
1. Barbonne Rémy, New urbanism, gentrification and daily mobility: lessons learned from the Bois-Francs district and the Plateau Mont-Royal, in Metropolization seen from the inside, edited by Senecal G. & Behrer L. Publication to be published by the Presses de l’Université du Québec.