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| AARP volunteers get ready to begin a walkability audit uptown with guest speaker Gil Penalosa of 8-80 Cities in October. Photo: Juan Ossa |
Monday morning, I learned that the Town of Matthews in
southern Mecklenburg County is the first, and to date only, municipality in
North Carolina to sign on as an AARP Age Friendly Community.
That AARP initiative, as it turns out, is an affiliate of the WHO’s Age-Friendly
Cities and Communities Program, a global effort dating to 2006 to help
cities prepare for both increasing urbanization and for an aging population, as
the huge Baby Boom generation hits retirement age.
Michael Olender, the Charlotte-based associate state
director for AARP, says he’s in conversations with the Charlotte mayor’s office
about whether Charlotte should also seek to join.
What does “age-friendly community” have to do with
walkability and livability? Simply this: As planners and policymakers focus on
the wishes and needs of the huge Millennial generation, Olender says, not much
attention is being paid to the needs of what the older generation wants. But,
he says, “What Boomers want mirrors very closely what Millennials want. They
want to walk. They want good public transit.”
Fast-forward a few hours. I’m at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg
Planning Commission’s monthly work session. Planning commissioner Deb Ryan, an
associate professor of urban design at UNC Charlotte, is giving a short
presentation on the role of livability and public health in city planning. She
pointedly did not call it “sustainability.”
“ ‘Sustainability’ means everything and nothing,” Ryan said.
Instead, she talked about becoming a “livable city.”
“While you may be
opposed to sustainability, you can’t be opposed to better public health,” she
said.
But what about the World Health Organization? As Ryan
described how cities throughout history have acted to improve the health of their
residents, she showed the WHO’s definition of health: “A state of complete
physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or
infirmity.”
“We’ve created a world where it’s much easier to drive than
to walk,” Ryan said. “We’ve created neighborhoods where to get anywhere you
have to drive. People have grown up with this. They think it’s normal.”
To show how transportation choices are a public health
issue, Ryan pointed not only to the air pollution from auto exhaust, but to the
role of physical exercise and to diseases today. In 1900 tuberculosis was the
second leading cause of death in the U.S., with pneumonia (often related to TB)
and influenza No. 1. By 1998 the leading cause of death was cardiovascular
disease, with cancer a distant second. And research from the Activing Living
Research project has found, for instance, that people who live in walkable communities
are two times as likely to get enough physical activity as those who don’t.
The planning commission is an appointed advisory body that offers
recommendations, not final decisions, on rezonings and planning policies. Nevertheless,
Ryan urged her fellow commissioners to consider taking a stand in favor of stronger
measures to move the city toward livability. “We have such a car-centric city
now,” she said. “Are we stuck with what we have?”
And I’ll go out on a limb to note that not many people or
neighborhoods in Charlotte can claim to have “complete physical, mental and social
well-being.” But can we do better at the way we're building the city? Absolutely
.