Introduction

This site is intended to serve as an archive of Impacts of Sprawl and Community Design on Public Health, an interactive preconference workshop offered as a part of the 2003 ASPH Environmental Health Conference. The goal of this workshop was to increase participants' understanding of the relationship between the built environment and public health, and to raise their awareness of how environmental policy affects this relationship.

Preconference Workshop Agenda

The workshop was held in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina and conducted in one of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's "Green Buildings," a state-of-the-art facility that was constructed using "green" or sustainable building concepts. Sustainable building is the practice of creating healthier and more resource-efficient models of construction, in order to reduce the environmental impact of constructing and operating traditional buildings. (See www.epa.gov/rtp)

During the first part of this workshop, speakers presented on public health issues affected by the built environment. The second part featured an interactive Pedestrian Roadshow, modeled after an exercise developed by the US Department of Transportation, in which participants applied the knowledge and concepts they had learned earlier.

This archive site has three sections which trace the workshop activities throughout the day. To best recreate the conference, we recommend proceeding through the site pages in chronological order.

Morning Speakers contains video archives of the conference opening, as well as speakers from CDC, NIEHS, NIH, UNC-CH and the NCSGA, who discuss topics such as obesity, diabetes, Smart Growth, and planning policies and programs that promote physical activity. Note: Each video has been synched to the individual speaker’s PowerPoint presentation.

Afternoon Speakers contains synched video/PowerPoint archives of two brief lunch presentations on aspects related to the concept of "active living by design," as well as a presentation introducing the interactive portion of the workshop, the Pedestrian Roadshow.

Interactive Roadshow describes the Pedestrian Roadshow and recreates the second part of the exercise, in which participants went out "on the road" to apply what they had learned in the workshop so far. This section features an interactive map of the area that participants evaluated, information on what they observed, ideas for how the area could be improved to support walkability, a downloadable walkability checklist, and a list of several resources that would be helpful in learning about these topics.