In Urban Sprawl and Public Health, Howard Frumkin, Lawrence Frank, and Richard Jackson, three of the nation's leading public health and urban planning experts explore an intriguing question: How does the physical environment in which we live affect our health? For decades, growth and development in our communities has been of the low-density, automobile-dependent type known as sprawl. The authors examine the direct and indirect impacts of sprawl on human health and well-being, and discuss the prospects for improving public health through alternative approaches to design, land use, and transportation.
Urban Sprawl and Public Health offers a comprehensive look at the interface of urban planning, architecture, transportation, community design, and public health. It summarizes the evidence linking adverse health outcomes with sprawling development, and outlines the complex challenges of developing policy that promotes and protects public health. Anyone concerned with issues of public health, urban planning, transportation, architecture, or the environment will want to read Urban Sprawl and Public Health.
Howard Frumkin, MD, DrPH is Senior Vice President of the Trust for Public Land, and professor emeritus of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences at the University of Washington School of Public Health, where he was Dean from 2010-2016. He was previously head of Our Planet, Our Health at the Wellcome Trust, director of the National Center for Environmental Health and Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (NCEH/ATSDR), and Special Assistant to the CDC Director for Climate Change and Health, and Professor and Chair of Environmental and Occupational Health at Emory University's Rollins School of Public Health and Professor of Medicine at Emory Medical School.
Dr. Frumkin has served on the Boards of the Bullitt Foundation, the Seattle Parks Foundation, the American Public Health Association, the US Green Building Council, the Children and Nature Network, and Physicians for Social Responsibility, among others. He has served on the Steering Committee of the Planetary Health Alliance (Harvard University), as a faculty affiliate at UCLA's Center for Healthy Climate Solutions, and on advisory committees to the Global Consortium on Climate and Health Education (Columbia University), the Medical Society Consortium on Climate & Health (George Mason University), EcoHealth International, and the Yale Center on Climate Change and Health.
He is the author, co-author, or editor of over 300 scientific journal articles, chapters, and books, including the standard environmental health textbook,
Environmental Health: From Global to Local, and four Island Press titles.
Dr. Frumkin is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians, the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, Collegium Ramazzini, and the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland, and an elected member of the Washington State Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine. He loves cycling, kayaking, and hiking. He is married to radio journalist Joanne Silberner, and has two children.
Larry Frank is Bombadier Chair in Sustainable Transportation Systems at the School of Community and Regional Planning at the University of British Columbia. He recently left the Georgia Institute of Technology where he was an assistant professor in the City Planning Program. He is a registered landscape architect and holds a master in Civil Engineering Transportation Planning and a Ph.D. in Urban Design and Planning from the University of Washington.
Richard J. Jackson, MD, MPH, is Professor and Chair of Environmental Health Sciences at the School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also a faculty member in the departments of Pediatrics, Urban Planning, and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. A pediatrician and public health leader, he has served as State Health Officer for California and in many other leadership positions in both the environmental health and infectious disease fields. For nine years he was director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) National Center for Environmental Health in Atlanta, for which he received the Presidential Distinguished Service award.
While in California he helped establish the California Birth Defects Monitoring Program and state and national laws to reduce risks from dangerous pesticides, especially to farm workers and children. While at the CDC, he established the national asthma epidemiology and control program, oversaw the Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program, and instituted the current federal effort to "biomonitor" chemical levels in the U.S. population. In the late 1990s he was the CDC leader in establishing the U.S. National Pharmaceutical Stockpile to prepare for terrorism and other disasters (the stockpile was activated on September 11, 2001). He has received the Breast Cancer Fund's Hero Award, as well as Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Public Health Law Association and New Partners for Smart Growth. He received an MD from the University of California at San Francisco and an MPH from the University of California at Berkeley.
Dr. Jackson lectures and speaks on many issues, particularly those related to the built environment and health. He has co-authored two Island Press Books:
Urban Sprawl and Public Health and, more recently,
Making Healthy Places: Designing and Building for Health, Well-Being, and Sustainability with Andrew L. Dannenberg and Howard Frumkin. He is the narrator of a 2011 PBS special Designing Healthy Communities. He has served on many environmental and health boards, as well as the Board of Directors of the American Institute of Architects.
