Cities’ neighbourhoods have long been ranked, like Hollywood stars, according to their beauty and magnetic personalities.
But cities are now being increasingly divided into healthy and sick zones. If you live in downtown Vancouver or New York, where the tree canopy is lush and you can easily walk to an organic café or a yoga class, you belong to a privileged class not only because of the real estate values in your neighbourhood but because you’re likely to have a higher life expectancy.
This is the new crisis of cities: Badly designed neighbourhoods are literally sapping people of their ability to live fully.
If, as a newly arrived immigrant, poverty has driven you to the inner or outer suburbs, where you live in a basement apartment or high above the concrete ground in a residential tower, you are far more likely to suffer from type 2 diabetes and its related consequences such as blindness and amputation. Most of Canada’s growth comes from immigrants, but the troubling fact is that Hispanics, blacks and South Asians are genetically predisposed to diabetes. Because of the compounding of these forces, you and your neighbours can expect a lower life expectancy.
A poor diet, high in saturated fat and low on fruits and vegetables, causes excess weight. Once obesity sets in, especially if it develops at a young age, type 2 diabetes usually follows. A sedentary lifestyle fuels the problem. That’s why some medical researchers and health offices are joining forces with urban planners to design neighbourhoods that are more conducive to activity. Healthy eating combined with increases in physical exercise – walking with the kids to school or biking to the cinema – would help to mitigate the rise in the prevalence of obesity over the last two decades. They say that Canadians need to embrace the Danish model of urban wellness, or suffer a health disaster.
There is a worldwide epidemic of obesity and type 2 diabetes. Canada’s two million cases of diabetes are expected to double over the next decade, according to a 2008 report from the Canadian Diabetes Association. Three times as many young teenagers are overweight now as there were 25 years ago, according to a 2006 Statistics Canada health report. Up to 14 per cent of the populations of Toronto and New York City live with diabetes, a rate that far exceeds World Health Organization predictions.
It’s a cruel fate.
People who live in the northern, unwalkable fringes of low-income Toronto, or across the border in the marginalized, dehumanized neighbourhoods of New York’s East Harlem and South Bronx will live about 20 fewer years than those in downtown, vibrant neighbourhoods, according to a 2007 report by the City University of New York’s Campaign Against Diabetes and the Public Health Association of New York City.
In the past 10 years, the number of New Yorkers diagnosed with diabetes has increased by 250 per cent. Meanwhile, in the beautiful neighbourhoods of Manhattan, the rate of diabetes is six times lower.
New York and Toronto share another harsh urban reality: Both cities top the charts in North America for numbers of high-rise residential towers. Half Toronto’s population lives in vertical towers, a citywide phenomenon that touches every ward.
When a tower sits amid a variety of housing types in high-density neighbourhoods, where restaurants and retail can thrive, tower residents can engage with the street life. But in the northeast and northwest quadrants of Toronto, in neighbourhoods such as Malvern and Rexdale that have few sidewalks and no sensory enticements such as the Art Gallery of Ontario or the dramatically lit CN Tower, there’s little reason to engage in the outside world.
