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.