The complicated problem of urban obesity

Cities are good for your waistline, or so the argument goes. One prominent study published in 2014 in the Journal of Transport & Health found that places with more compact street networks and intersections—namely, dense cities—are associated with lower levels of obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, and asthma. “It might not be common for people to explicitly contemplate health when selecting a place to live, but this research indicates it is worth considering,” the scientists concluded.

But panning out to all cities, and not just the uber-dense ones, the health picture gets a lot more complicated. As CityLab’s own Aria Bendix pointed out earlier this year, health problems among urban dwellers map pretty tightly with economic class, in part because predominantly poor and minority neighborhoods have been stranded by disastrous urban planning decisions: large roads, major highways that cut through communities, and metro lines far away from the working-class populations that need them.

The implications are wide-reaching. In a paper released this week in conjunction with the International Conference on Urban Health in San Francisco, policymakers from the World Health Organization and UN-Habitat show that the urban health problems are only growing—in part because cities are growing, too. Half of the world’s people will live in cities by 2050, the researchers estimate, and 2 billion of those will be in slums. Even so, urban health problems can’t just be traced to exploding populations.