摘要：Joint efforts by fields of public health in the last decade have advocated use of the built environment to protect health. Past involvement by public health advocates in urban policy, however, has had mixed results. Although public health has significantly contributed to health improvements, its participation in urban renewal activities was problematic. Health advocates and the American Public Health Association produced guidelines that were widely used to declare inner-city areas blighted and provided a scientific justification for demolishing neighborhoods and displacing mostly poor and minority people. Furthermore, health departments failed to uphold their legal responsibility to ensure that relocated families received safe, affordable housing alternatives. These failures have important implications for future health-related work on the built environment and other core public health activities. THE PAST DECADE HAS SEEN a reemergence of efforts to connect public health and urban planning. Focusing on the health effects of the built environment, new research has shed light on the association between urban sprawl and obesity, the association between the physical form of neighborhoods and the physical activity levels of its inhabitants, and the role of housing in asthma. On the basis of this research, new programs are being developed, new building and design standards have been proposed, and there is new willingness to manipulate the built environment to promote and protect health. During this process, it will be important to remember the lessons of 20th-century program failures as public health seeks to intervene again in the built environment in this new century.
