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From the earliest days of urban living, city dwellers have harbored concerns about crowded and unsanitary living conditions, and civic leaders have made concerted efforts to improve the design of their cities᾿ physical and social structures. As cities have grown, so too has the importance of urban planning and urban health as fields of research and practice. Despite their common roots, however, the two fields have diverged substantially in their approaches and emphases.
Attention to the factors that challenge the health of contemporary urban populations suggests that reconnecting the two fields could be fruitful — even essential — in improving urban health. The student organizers of this workshop feel that both the public health curriculum and current work in the field could be enriched by insights and contributions from relevant disciplines. We envisioned this workshop as a means to expand public health᾿s conception of the urban while remaining firmly grounded in the field᾿s mission and goals.
In this one-day workshop, we invite participants to engage in conversation about the life and death of cities and the people who live in them. Each facet of the workshop is intended to highlight potential connections between public health and the natural, built, and socioeconomic environments in cities. In bringing together a variety of perspectives on urban issues, we aim to explore both the concepts and language — common or disparate — that structure discourses on cities within and among disciplines.
The primary goal of this workshop is to highlight the issues and areas over which urban health and urban planning overlap, intersect, diverge, and collide. Rather than aspiring to immediate consensus, we hope to articulate an integrated perspective on urban health. We are pursuing a productive synthesis that will inform and shape a more comprehensive and nuanced agenda for education and training, research, and practice in urban public health.
We invite workshop participants to consider either or both of two broad questions:
What are the public health implications of past and current trends in urban planning and development?
How and to what extent can urban planning address the health challenges facing city populations?
We expect that the discussions sparked by these questions will reflect on the two fields’ mutual awareness of each others’ goals and priorities and tackle problems and potential solutions of particular relevance for urban planning and public health alike.
Participants are urged to discuss the myriad political, social, economic and ecological factors that contribute to urban health inequalities. While recognizing that our invited speakers and participants may hail from beyond the Baltimore city limits, we are dedicated to grounding the workshop discussions in the everyday realities that confront the residents of Charm City. To that end, our moderator and discussant will help us practically situate these issues in the Baltimore context.
We envision this workshop as the first in a series of conversations among various stakeholders about the complex interactions between urban environments, urban living, and urban health. Debates about problems, goals, priorities, target populations, and solutions are welcomed and encouraged.