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Cities Giving Residents A Healthy Boost

Friday, 10 June 2016 13:26 GMT

Daily Table offers residents in an underserved neighbourhood access to healthy and affordable produce and ready-meals. Courtesy Sustainia.

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* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.

This year’s Sustainia100 demonstrates that the narrative around health and cities is being turned on its head.

Cities don’t have a reputation for being oases of health and well-being. Industrial production has long been a main driver of unhealthy air pollution and sprawling urban landscapes have created ripe breeding grounds for obesity and non-communicable diseases. But today’s cities are proving that they have the means and the will to reverse this narrative and embark on a new era where urban societies facilitate, rather than inhibit, good health.

This is one of the key trends witnessed in the 2016 edition of the Sustainia100, an annual publication by innovation platform, Sustainia. Released today, the publication brings together and highlights 100 of the most innovative sustainable solutions available today across 10 sectors of society. The 100 solutions in this year’s edition demonstrate that faced with systemic challenges, companies, cities, and organizations around the world are creating and capitalizing on systemic opportunities. The way in which our physical surroundings impact our health is one of those systemic challenges, and by finding ways to reshape and redefine urban environments to facilitate health, cities and companies are proving that these complex and interconnected problems also have intertwined solutions.

But what does it mean to facilitate health? First and foremost, it means to catalyze healthy lifestyles by creating the necessary conditions. City governments have a big role to play here, and two of the most obvious ways to do this are by implementing active and public transportation infrastructure and by cultivating green public spaces. Take the City of Copenhagen, which contributes to the Sustainia100 this year by proving that smart infrastructure can offer a big health boost. The City recently finished upgrading 380 traffic signals, part of a larger investment in intelligent transport systems, which will allow it to organize better “green waves” that prioritize buses and cyclists. Ultimately, these upgrades will help bus riders and cyclists to save up to 20 percent and 10 percent on travel times, respectively, thereby further encouraging these healthier forms of transit and helping to limit air pollution.

Another city using urban space to facilitate health, also featured in this year’s publication, is Medellin, Colombia. The city is pushing ahead with its innovative urban planning strategies by constructing the Metropolitan Green Belt, a 74-km stretch of well-planned green space designed to offer protection against landslides for primarily low-income residents on the city’s fringe. It also provides much needed outdoor recreational space and food growing lots on the upper edges of the city, which contribute to a more active population with access to locally grown produce.

Not so coincidentally, these city solutions not only help improve the health of residents, they also improve the resilience of the landscape. Active and public transit reduce the need for private automobiles and their associated air pollution, traffic congestion, and CO2 emissions, while green spaces absorb carbon, prevent flooding by retaining rainwater, and battle the urban heat island effect: a win-win situation for health and urban sustainability.

Catalyzing good health in cities is not just the responsibility or goal of local governments. As we see in the Sustainia100, companies and communities are also proving that the city can be home to good health and nutrition, rather than fast food and high cholesterol. Daily Table, featured in this year’s edition, is a prime example of this. Located in the working class neighborhood of Dorchester near Boston, Massachusetts, Daily Table sells fresh produce and ready to eat meals at affordable prices by sourcing their products and ingredients from mainstream supermarkets that have excess or cosmetically blemished food that would otherwise be wasted. This model allows Daily Table to help solve a number of intertwined health challenges, felt particularly acutely in low-income urban neighborhoods, such as the fact that while one-third of American adults are obese or overweight, 15 percent of the US population was food insecure in 2014. Making matters worse, Americans waste 60 million tons of food every year. Stopping food waste while selling affordable nutritious meals to the urban poor, Daily Table shows us how communities and city-based businesses can promote health while mitigating serious environmental challenges in one go.

Medellin, Copenhagen, and Daily Table are just a few of the examples from Sustainia100 that prove that cities are changing course to provide healthier and more resilient environments. Local leaders and city-based businesses are realizing that through well planned infrastructure, community engagement, and equitable access to resources, cities can, and must, become the health facilitators for the next era of urban development.

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The 2016 Sustainia100 can be freely downloaded here. You can follow the conversation on Twitter through ${esc.dollar}{esc.dollar}{esc.hash}100Solutions.

Sustainia helps public and private organizations create a more sustainable tomorrow, building on the solutions available today. As a world leader in navigating the new market opportunities for the Sustainable Development Goals and with a database of more than 4,500 cutting-edge innovations, Sustainia‘s mission is to innovate the business models of the future. Sustainia is supported by strategic partners R20 and UN Global Compact.

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