Book Review

Healing Habitats

By Aaron M. Cohen

Urban Design: Health and the Therapeutic Environment by Cliff Moughtin, Kate McMahon Moughtin, and Paola Signoretta. Elsevier. 2009. 262 pages. Paperback. $60.95.

Facing climate change, resource depletion, peak oil, and global migration, urban designers are challenged to create sustainable environments that contribute to the overall well-being of those who inhabit them.

This fifth book in Cliff Moughtin’s Urban Design series focuses on the design concepts that will guide humanity to a more sustainable future, promote mental and physical health, and create or provide a sense of community. Like the first four volumes in the series, it speaks clearly and eloquently to professionals working in the fields of urban planning and urban design.

Moughtin and his co-authors argue that environmental health directly impacts individual and communal health — both mental and physical. This poses a problem for those living in densely packed, highly developed urban areas. A decreasing quality of city life reduces health and life expectancy, regardless of a city’s size. Yet, due to poor planning, the two typically go hand in hand: As cities expand, the overall quality of life decreases.

Moughtin notes that “current thinking on sustainability in urban development, which promotes compact and high-density cities, goes against research findings on the adverse effects of urbanization on mental health.” He argues that it is not only possible but imperative to mix urban and rural development. Throughout the book, he shows why such settlements will ultimately be more sustainable than compact, high-density urban areas.

The book opens with a case study of the Sanctuary at Epidaurus in ancient Greece, a remotely located healing center that mixed entertainment and hedonistic pleasure with spiritual rejuvenation and exercise. Here, Moughtin begins to build a case for a holistic approach to urban planning in which social, environmental, health, and other concerns are understood as being interconnected.

Leaving ancient Epidaurus, the reader enters contemporary Havana. Poor, noisy, crowded, Epidaurus’ opposite in many ways, Cuba’s capital city nonetheless boasts progressive health, education, and rural development policies that Moughtin characterizes as being “centered on the well-being of the individual while emphasizing care for the environment and the need for sustainable development.” Especially notable are the government-sanctioned urban gardens throughout Havana. “Economic necessity has seen the need to introduce nature into the Cuban urban environment,” Moughtin writes. “It has taken the form of intensive gardening being practiced on every free (unused) piece of urban land.” Urban agriculture and community gardens contribute greatly to a community’s ability to be self-sufficient and self-sustaining.

Another case study is New Lanark, the eighteenth-century Scottish model city constructed by factory owner and social reformer Robert Owen with the well-being of the burgeoning industrial workforce in mind. Moughtin characterizes the town as the “successful realization of a vision to provide dignified living conditions for workers in an idyllic natural setting.” The founder of the cooperative movement, Owen believed that environment affected individual character as well as community well-being and hoped to improve the living and working conditions of both urban and rural working classes. New Lanark, which boasted a central green space, was both self-sustaining and sustainable long before those terms gained their present meanings.

Bridging the unlikely gap between Robert Owen and modern suburbia is another forward-thinking, cooperative-minded factory owner, William Lever, who designed the garden village of Port Sunlight in 1888 near Liverpool. Like Owen, Lever also understood that workers’ collective health and happiness led to greater productivity and, ultimately, a more successful business. Moughtin points to Lever’s Port Sunlight as “the foundation for the garden city and the garden suburb, inspiring the suburban developments from the 1930s and the post–Second World War new towns.”

The final section of the book focuses on using the knowledge gained from earlier examples to find the best possible ways to design therapeutic environments that can help offset climate change and also promote general health. It emphasizes the oft-forgotten distinction between neighborhood and community, and the importance of being part of a community to an individual’s overall well-being. The authors also discuss current theories such as bioregionalism (ecologically defined communities) and show how economically self-reliant ecovillages can preserve the nature and culture of the region.

One of the most intriguing metaphors that the book presents is “urban metabolism.” Moughtin argues that cities should have a “circular metabolism” that more closely resembles that of the natural world — a healthy living being. Instead, cities have a linear metabolism: “The city consumes goods, energy and food at high rates, then pollutes the environment heavily with organic wastes, noxious fumes and inorganic wastes,” Moughtin writes. Drawing on systems dynamics, Moughtin advocates designing a city that can function as a self-sustaining closed system, rather than one that operates as a more rapacious open system.

The book ends with a tour of a model city that idealistically points the way toward the future: Freiburg, Germany, “Europe’s solar city,” is leading the way with its emphasis on sustainable development and ecological preservation.

Those in the field will find this to be a highly readable, lavishly illustrated text. Among the many valuable lessons contained within its pages is one conclusion that bears repeating: Ecological co-housing and other intentional forms of community are what may ultimately best sustain us, mentally and physically.

About the Reviewer

Aaron M. Cohen is a staff editor for THE FUTURIST and World Future Review.