Resilient, Green… and Healthy

The environmental health field has been swept by major changes in recent years. One was the rediscovery of the " built environment " as a key determinant of human health. Community design—including land use and transportation decisions, but extending to such arenas as energy, housing, and food—affects outcomes as diverse as cardiovascular health, respiratory heath, cancer, injury risk, and social capital. A second major advance has been the growing appreciation of global change as a fundamental driver of human health. Climate change is perhaps the best recognized example, but other global changes—peak petroleum, biodiversity loss, land use changes, and resource depletion—also loom large. The two books reviewed here combine both domains. They describe how global changes will affect what is now the predominant human habitat: the city. But the books do more than describe; they brim with recommendations for how cities can become more resilient to global changes, more sustainable, and implicitly (for health is rarely mentioned in either book) more healthy. The books are the product of a scholarly dream team. Timothy Beatley is professor of sustainable communities at the University of Virginia, and Peter Newman is professor of sustainability at Curtin University in Australia, both leading authorities on sustainable community design. Heather Boyer, co-author of Resilient Cities, is a seasoned editor at Island Press, the preeminent environmental publisher. Resilient Cities is a succinct, wide-reaching, and readable overview, with several important attributes. First, it considers two major global trends, climate change and peak petroleum, jointly; too many recent analyses have focused on one or the other of these, although they will clearly emerge in tandem. Second, it is suffused with hope, a deliberate counterpoint to the gloom and doom typical of so much global change discourse. Third, it is grounded in the concept of resilience— " the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and still retain its basic function and structure " —as applied to cities. Finally, the authors recognize that resiliency is not simply a technical challenge; it requires civic commitment to long-term planning, participa-tory democracy, cooperation, and multisectoral partnership. The book posits four possible scenarios for resource-intensive cities: collapse, reversion to rural form, division, or resiliency. Collapse is conceivable but certainly not desirable. The " ruralized city " has been advocated by some peak oil commentators, who point out that local agricultural production would both utilize idle land in sprawling communities and reduce the need for …