Health and The Built Environment Seminar

Yesterday Reid Ewing, a Research Professor at the National Center for Smart Growth, visited SHORE and gave a talk that touched on various aspects of the relationship between the Built Environment and Public Health.

He talked about the sprawl index they developed, which is comprised of: low density, highly segregated land use, lack of centering, and poor street connectivity. Low accessibility is also a characteristic of sprawl.

Sprawl has been linked to outcomes like: increased VMT (Vehicle Miles Traveled), worse air quality, climate change, and traffic safety.

Climate change and traffic safety were new ideas things for me.

Reid also mentioned the 6 "D" variables that influence travel at the meso and micro scale: Density, Diversity, Design, Demographics, Distance to transit, and Destination accessibility.

Some of those D's are relatively straightforward. Design is more complicated to measure but the key point is that "human scale" design is good.

A very interesting comment that Reid made was that Destination accessibility is the most important variable in terms of VMT. This relates to the CO2 project ie my model which measures change in accessibility under different transport scenarios.

Sustainability: Paul Weaver Seminar & NZSSES Conference

I thought about submitting an abstract for this years NZSSES (New Zealand Society for Sustainability Engineering and Science) Conference. It's on "Blueprints for Sustainable Infrastructure". Of course I've never actually studied or researched or read about sustainability in particular. I've just heard the word used everywhere.

So in the interests of a crash course in sustainability I went along to the Paul Weaver lecture on the MATISSE project. Very interesting! And my goodness the seats in the new Business School building are comfortable! Anyway. The lecture which was scheduled for half an hour went on for over one and a half hours!!

Sustainability seems to be an interesting idea. More so because it seems kind of obvious to me, yet it also seems to be a problem and lots of people seem to be very concerned about it and are looking for ways to solve the problem (again it seems obvious, but maybe I'm naive and don't know all the intricacies).

Paul was an interesting and enthusiastic speaker and because it was all new to me, he sparked lots of ideas. I will write about them later.

Anyway, thinking about submitting an abstract for the conference (I didn't) and going to the lecture made me very curious about what all this sustainability fuss is about. My PhD probably relates to it. But then it seems that everything relates to it.