ULI’s 21 great ways to build healthy places!

 

Source: Urban Land Institute

The Urban Land Institute recently released its Building Healthy Places Toolkit. The document

“outlines 21 practical and evidence-based recommendations that the development community can use to promote health at the building or project scale.”

The recommendations are broken into three categories, as shown below. While some are obvious and common (prohibiting smoking), others are unique, pragmatic, and insightful.

Physical activity

• Incorporate a mix of land uses
• Design well-connected street networks at a human scale
• Provide sidewalks and enticing pedestrian-oriented streetscapes
• Provide infrastructure to support biking
• Design visible, enticing stairs to encourage everyday use
• Install stair prompts and signage
• Provide high quality spaces for multigenerational play and recreation
• Build play spaces for children

Healthy food and drinking water

•  Accommodate a grocery store
• Host a farmers market
• Promote healthy food retail
• Promote onsite gardening and farming
• Enhance access to drinking water

Healthy environmental and social well-being

• Ban smoking
• Use materials and products that support healthy indoor air quality
• Facilitate proper ventilation and air flow
• Maximize indoor lighting quality
• Increase access to nature
• Facilitate social engagement
• Adopt pet-friendly policies

SOURCE: ULI

The two recommendations that caught this planner’s eye (underlined above) and would be very easy to implement, have to do with stairways/staircases. ULI is spot on that architectural designs too often push stairways off to the side or into a dark corner. These should be brought out into the open, made well-lit and enticing, as a visual cue whenever possible and practical. This is not only applicable indoors but in outdoor settings such as the magnificent 16th Avenue tiled staircase in San Francisco – shown below.

16th Avenue Tiled Steps of San Francisco – Source: tiledsteps.org

What a terrific recommendation (among the others) by ULI! Many great cities are fortunate enough to already have heavenly grand exterior stairway for pedestrian movement, including Odessa, Rome, Paris, Edinburgh, San Francisco (see above), and Seattle. More on these in a subsequent post. Cheers!