by Neil Caudle

For generations, the American dream has been luring us out to the suburbs — to a gadget-packed house on a big, roomy lot with a couple of late-model cars in the drive. Safe from the dirt, din, and crime of big cities, the suburbs would be good for us, we thought.

And maybe they were, for a while. Then we noticed that highways had clogged with our cars as we toiled back and forth in a haze of gray smog. Even worse, an epidemic slowly crept across the suburbs — an epidemic of obesity and its deadly accomplices, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. In 2002, 59 percent of Americans were overweight or obese. In North Carolina, the percentage rose from 43.5 percent in 1987 to 59 percent in 2002. All of that fat put a drag on the economy as it pushed health-care costs through the roof.

The cause? Fast food and too much television are the usual suspects. But increasingly, researchers in planning and public health have begun to implicate a less obvious culprit — what they called the "built environment," much of which was built around cars.

Attila and Boris Mesits play ball on the green of Market Square in Southern Village in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Photo by Steve Exum; click to enlarge.

Is suburbia killing us with idleness and fat?

The problem isn't so simple. All kinds of factors — social, cultural, and psychological — incline us to camp on the sofa with soft drinks and chips. But when communities organize themselves around the automobile as the primary mode of transportation, they effectively engineer physical activity right out of the equation. Children can spend as much time riding to soccer practice as they spend on the field.

"We have latch-keyed our children within the four walls of their houses and schools," says Rich Killingsworth, research associate professor in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education, School of Public Health, "and they are watching TV and eating and not getting out unless somebody drives them somewhere."

Killingsworth, who came to Carolina two years ago from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, directs Active Living by Design, a $17 million project funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which also supports partner projects at San Diego State University and at Texas A&M. The focus of work at UNC-Chapel Hill, Killingsworth says, is to examine how people and their communities make decisions that encourage or discourage physical activity. Killingsworth was one of five authors of an article in the September/October 2003 issue of the American Journal of Health Promotion, reporting a small but significant association between urban sprawl and health risks.

"When we looked at the data across the United States, we found that as communities became less compact — sprawled out — they showed higher prevalence of hypertension, obesity, and less physical activity," Killingsworth says.

Active Living by Design will examine twenty-five communities nationally, looking at factors in transportation, education, law enforcement, city planning, architecture, and urban design. Chapel Hill, the only study site in North Carolina, offered an unusual chance to study a community already aspiring to some of the project's key goals.

"Chapel Hill is well suited to what we're trying to achieve," Killingsworth says. "It's built on a small-town concept, and decisions generally are made here with people in mind. You can see it in the influence of committees working on everything from bike paths to green space. And it's one of the few towns in America where the schools are fully connected with the sidewalk system."

Chapel Hill has become a laboratory for ideas in the active-living movement. Here, a student commutes to class on her bicycle. Photo by Steve Exum; click to enlarge.

Testing New Urban Ideals

Chapel Hill also includes two neighborhoods of keen interest to urban planners — Meadowmont and Southern Village, both of which were built more or less on the model of New Urbanism. The idea is to promote high-density urban development that integrates schools, businesses, green space, and recreation facilities, reducing the dependence on cars. Killingsworth, who lives in Southern Village and pedals a bike to his office on Market Street, says it's too early to tell whether these experiments in neighborhood design will make people more active. Yes, children do seem to be walking to school, and on mild evenings joggers and dog-walkers share the sidewalks with baby strollers and rollerbladers. But there's also evidence that people moving into high-density developments are slow to shed the habits of sedentary suburbia. For one thing, they can't resist their cars.

"We grow up with the understanding that the only way to travel is by car," Killingsworth says, "and the only way for communities to develop is with a separation of uses — we put homes in one place and we put businesses in another and parks over here and schools over there."

Segregating zones made sense in the days when the typical workplace was a noisy factory belching smoke. But today, most people work in relatively clean, presentable buildings that could easily share neighborhoods with houses and schools. Building workplaces, shopping, and schools into the same neighborhood could eliminate trips in the car and make walking or biking routine.

So far, this kind of mixed-use neighborhood represents only about one percent of the development in the United States, Killingsworth says. Changing the pattern will require more than a health-minded interest in walking and biking. Businesses and governments will have to see the economic advantage of having people out and about without cars. Take the Franklin Street corridor in Chapel Hill, for example. Businesses there would benefit, Killingsworth says, if nearby neighborhoods such as Southern Village were better connected to the corridor by sidewalks and bike paths.

"Sometimes, a few low-cost accommodations for pedestrians can lead to significant improvements in the vitality of a business district," Killingsworth says.

next: "people drive down to the shopping mall to walk"

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