The Case for Healthy Places connects community building with wellbeing Good health starts at home. But researchers are discovering that it also starts with well-designed neighborhoods, smart urban design, and healthy streets. A new report by the Project for Public Spaces, The Case for Healthy Places: Improving Health through Placemaking, synthesizes decades worth of research on the relationship between health outcomes and location to create a guidebook on what could be called preventative design. Creating places that encourage healthy behavior can serve as a valuable, cost-saving form of preventative care, and this report sheds light on the connection between clinical research and community building activities.
?To address the real health challenges of the 21st century,? explains Project for Public Spaces president and founder Fred Kent in a statement about the report, ?we need innovative solutions that look not only at the physical causes and symptoms of poor health, but also the social, economic, and environmental components of total well-being.?
Project for Public Spaces
Union Square Greenmarket in New York City

Created with the support of Kaiser Permanente, a health care consortium, and philanthropists Anne T. and Robert Bass, this new report contains recommendations and research meant to help health institutions, planners, and community organizations create and support healthy placemaking. Broken down into five sections?social supp...