Over the past decade, environmental sustainability has emerged as a prominent theme in the community development literature. In fact, the concept has become a standard feature of most economic and social development plans. Most models of sustainable community development stress the importance of widespread participation in the decision-making process.

Unfortunately, community studies document numerous barriers to broad involvement and the high level of activeness envisioned by proponents of sustainable community development. In searching for ways to overcome these barriers, scholars and policymakers have embraced the idea that we can enhance efforts to create more sustainable communities by increasing the local stock of social capital. We examine this line of reasoning in light of what we view as the most important conceptual issues surrounding the relationship between social capital and sustainable community development.

We conclude that before social capital is endorsed as a central component of public policy, much work remains to be done in terms of developing a more precise definition of the concept, situating it within extant theories of community, constructing better measures of social capital, documenting the activities and networks most important in building social capital, and gaining a better understanding of the forms of social capital that are most important in developing sustainable communities.

You can download the full paper here http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1475-682X.2001.tb01127.x/pdf

The 5th Healthy Cities: Working Together to Achieve Liveable Cities Conference

June 6-8 2012 Geeelog, Victoria, Australia

Many models of social sustainability have been proposed in the previous few decades, with the majority of these recognising a co-dependent interaction between three basic elements. These are generally recognised as community/social, environmental and economic. The interaction of these elements impacts on issues of equity, diversity, interconnectedness and acceptance; and there is widespread recognition that healthy communities are communities that accept and foster these ideals.

Of course addressing social sustainability in a meaningful way extends far beyond that of the built environment and requires a strong commitment from government, policy-makers and the greater community itself and has far greater public health connotations. However, it is important for us, as professionals within the property and construction sector, to be mindful of these models and ideas. People residing in urban environments spend up to 90% of their time contained by the built environment; so our influence and contribution to this environment, and consequently the effect on our interactions with and within it, is very significant.

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Healthy Cities Conference 2012 – June 6-8 Geelong
The 5th Healthy Cities: Working Together to Achieve Liveable Cities Conference will be a platform for Government and Industry sector professionals to discuss causes, effects and solutions that relate to population health, sustainability, natural resource management, transport, climate change, urban design and more.

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• Health and Productivity Benefits From Different Urban Transport and Related Land Use Options in Australia. (healthycities.wordpress.com)
• Achieving healthy urban transport systems by 2030: the role of walking and cycling (healthycities.wordpress.com)
• Responsible Urban Design (dirt.asla.org)

The presenation will provide a review discussing possible health indicators to be used in assessing future land use and transportation scenarios under differing climate change situations.

Urban form characteristics, such as density levels and mixed land uses are identified. These characteristics can be measured to determine the health impacts related to the transport choices they provide. The health benefits, and subsequent economic benefits particularly from health-related productivity, of walkable, transit orientated urban forms are well established and are measurable. Important health indicators include vehicle miles travelled, access to public transport, access to green areas, transportation related pollution levels, transportation related noise levels, density and mixed land use.

A comparison between a high walkability urban environment and a low walkability urban environment identifies various infrastructure, transportation greenhouse gas emissions and health costs. From this it is determined that infrastructure and transport costs dominate.

Greenhouse gas emission costs are small unless the social costs are considered, and then they become substantial but still lower than the infrastructure and transport costs. They are cumulative however and will become more important in future. The health costs are very small if considered to be those related to sickness however health-related productivity gains that are associated with highly walkable urban areas are substantial. Increased productivity considerably outweighs the savings of increased physical activity and reduced health cost reductions from active travel alone. Furthermore these productivity gains are additive to the other costs and together all of these costs provide a powerful economic rationale for developing urban forms geared towards active travel.

Dr Anne Matan, Dr Roman Trubka, Curtin University Sustainability Policy (CUSP) Institute WA

The 5th Healthy Cities: Working Together to Achieve Liveable Cities Conference – June 6th to 8th – Geelong, Victoria

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• WHO Finds Significant Health & Climate Benefits associated with Transit & Active Transportation (healthyandsustainable.wordpress.com)

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1. Fixed transit, preferably rail, above and below ground. Subways along all major travel corridors; buses or trams on all secondary corridors
Fixed-rail transit helps to guide development and keep the streets busy. When development happens around fixed-transit, it is easy to get around on foot because everything is closer together. On the contrary, when transit isn’t fixed, as with a diesel bus route, or it is designed around the auto, transit becomes impractical because everything is further apart. New York is an example of a walking city that grew up around fixed transit. Dallas is an example of an auto city built up around roadways. It is very convenient to get around without a car in a walking city built around fixed transit. This makes it so there are more people on the sidewalks, and businesses can thrive from walking traffic, without the need for parking. Fixed-transit can be light-rail, a subway, or a bus that operates from overhead wires. A busway built for diesel buses is also fixed transit, but because the bus can leave the busway it doesn’t have the same positive impact on development and density as other forms of fixed transit. If your city doesn’t have fixed-transit, advocate for it. It will take a long time to change the way things are built, but a convenient walking district can spring up in little time when fixed transit and high density are established in an area.

See the full list here: Top Ten Characteristic of a Healthy City.

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• Brisbane Reality Check-The high cost of “cheap” busways.Is Cairns going to get a reality check with its Rapid Bus Network – Busway-$132million/km – Light Rail-$25 million /km (rajcairnsreport.wordpress.com)

Three alternative visions are presented for the role of walking and cycling in urban areas in the UK for the year 2030 and a number of alternative pathways (in the form of storylines) showing how these visions might be achieved. Each vision presents a view of an ‘imaginary’ urban area where walking and cycling are considerably more important than at present. The accompanying pathways are made up of three different types of storyline, operating at different scales.

Macro-storylines concern those developments happening in the world that, whilst ‘exogenous’ to the transport system, have direct impacts on the system. Meso-storylines describe accompanying developments within the transport system covering the ‘aggregate reactions’ (on a national level) of organisations and trip-makers to events and trends described in the macro-storylines.

Micro-storylines concern how individual local authorities might act (‘autonomously’) in response to the contexts provided by macro- and meso-storylines, taking into account factors relevant to their particular cities. The micro-storylines described in the paper have been developed through a number of ‘city-specific’ expert workshops, whose overall aim has been to understand how the generic theoretically-based visions and storylines may be locally contextualised and adjusted to meet the needs and requirements of ‘real’ places. The paper concludes with thoughts on how cities might develop and incorporate large scale change over relatively long periods of time to promote sustainable and healthy living.

Dr Miles Tight, Senior Lecturer, Institute for Transport Studies, University of Leeds, UK

The 5th Healthy Cities: Working Together to Achieve Liveable Cities Conference
6th to 8th of June 2012 Geelong,  Victoria,

PRIVACY Commissioner Timothy Pilgrim  has called for a unified approach to privacy protections in his response to the Gillard government’s draft legislation for its $500 million personally controlled e-health record program.

Read the full story in the Australian

For the first time, single households and couples with no children at home are expected to eclipse the classic households of mum, dad and children living with them.

Read the full story here

The Trust for Public Land has released a report, detailing numerous ways in which the park system can maximize their contributions to the health of individuals. Many urban parks make it too difficult to exercise, whether they are uninviting, confusing, or simply don’t offer enough choices for activity… more Urban Parks for Healthy Cities | Planetizen.

He is the author of “Towards the Healthy City”.

Jason Corburn at the ICUH 2010 from The New York Academy of Medicine on Vimeo.