CityReads | 10 Books on City and Public Health

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10 Books on City and Public Health

Cities’ built environments shape our health and well-being.

Efforts to curb the spread of novel coronavirus continue. What city can do to improve the public health? Here I compile 10 books on city and public health. Cities’ built environments shape our health and well-being. How the relationship between body and city evolves? To combat plagues, what cities have done historically? How urban planning, public health, medicine, social policy, geography and cartography can help us to build more healthy cities?

1.Epidemic City: The Politics of Public Health in New York by James Colgrove

An insightful chronicle of the changing public health demands in New York City. The first permanent Board of Health in the United States was created in response to a cholera outbreak in New York City in 1866. By the mid-twentieth century, thanks to landmark achievements in vaccinations, medical data collection, and community health, the NYC Department of Health had become the nation's gold standard for public health. However, as the city's population grew in number and diversity, the department struggled to balance its efforts between the treatment of diseases―such as AIDS, tuberculosis, and West Nile Virus―and the prevention of illness-causing factors like lead paint, heroin addiction, homelessness, smoking, and unhealthy foods. In Epidemic City, historian of public health James Colgrove chronicles the challenges faced by the health department since New York City's mid-twentieth-century "peak" in public health provision.

This insightful volume draws on archival research and oral histories to examine how the provision of public health has adapted to the competing demands of diverse public needs, public perceptions, and political pressure. By examining the department's successes and failures during the ambitious social programs of the 1960s, the fiscal crisis of the 1970s, the struggles with poverty and homelessness in the 1980s and 1990s, and in the post-9/11 era, Epidemic City shows how the NYC Department of Health has defined the role and scope of public health services for the entire nation.

2. The Contagious City: The Politics of Public Health in Early Philadelphia by Simon Finger

The Contagious City details how early Americans struggled to preserve their collective health against both the strange new perils of the colonial environment and the familiar dangers of the traditional city, through a period of profound transformation in both politics and medicine.

Philadelphia was the paramount example of this reforming tendency. Tracing the city's history from its founding on the banks of the Delaware River in 1682 to the yellow fever outbreak of 1793, Simon Finger emphasizes the importance of public health and population control in decisions made by the city's planners and leaders. He also shows that key figures in the city's history, including Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush, brought their keen interest in science and medicine into the political sphere. Finger makes clear that medicine and politics were inextricably linked, and that both undergirded the debates over such crucial concerns as the city's location, its urban plan, its immigration policy, and its creation of institutions of public safety. In framing the history of Philadelphia through the imperatives of public health, The Contagious City offers a bold new vision of the urban history of colonial America.

3. Expelling the Plague: The Health Office and the Implementation of Quarantine in Dubrovnik, 1377-1533 Zlata Blažina-Tomić

A vibrant city-state on the Adriatic sea, Dubrovnik, also known as Ragusa, was a hub for the international trade between Europe and the Ottoman Empire.

In 1377, Dubrovnik became the first city in the world to develop and implement quarantine legislation, and in 1390 it established the earliest recorded permanent Health Office. The city’s preoccupation with plague control and the powers granted to its Health Office led to a rich archival record chronicling the city’s experience of plague, its attempts to safeguard public health, and the social effects of its practices of quarantine, prosecution, and punishment. Outlining the contributions of Dubrovnik in conceiving and establishing early public health measures in Europe, Expelling the Plague reveals how health concerns of the past greatly resemble contemporary anxieties about battling epidemics such as SARS, avian flu, and the Ebola virus.

4.Body and City: Histories of Urban Public Health by Sally Sheard

A provocative survey of new research in the history of urban public health, Body and City links the approaches of demographic and medical history with the methodologies of urban history and historical geography. It challenges older methodologies, offering new insights into the significance of cultural history. This book explores important issues and experiences in the public health arena in diverse European settings from the Middle Ages to the early 20th century.

5. Social Determinants of Health: The Solid Facts

Poorer people live shorter lives and are more often ill than the rich. This disparity has drawn attention to the remarkable sensitivity of health to the social environment. This publication examines this social gradient in health, and explains how psychological and social influences affect physical health and longevity. It then looks at what is known about the most important social determinants of health today, and the role that public policy can play in shaping a social environment that is more conducive to better health.

6.Healing Gotham: New York City’s Public Health Policies for the Twenty-First Century by Bruce F. Berg

Throughout its history, New York City has been challenged by a variety of public health crises. Since the nineteenth century—when it became one of the first American cities to develop a comprehensive public health infrastructure—New York has also stood at the forefront of formulating and implementing urban health policy. Healing Gotham examines in depth how the city has responded to five serious contemporary public health threats: childhood lead poisoning, childhood asthma, HIV/AIDS, obesity, and West Nile virus.

Bruce F. Berg examines the rise and incidence of each condition in the city while explaining why the array of primary tools utilized by urban policy makers—including monitoring and surveillance, education, regulations, and the direct provision of services—have been successful in controlling public health problems. He also argues that forces such as race and ethnicity, New York City’s relationship to the state and federal government, the promotion of economic development, and the availability of knowledge related to preventing, treating, and managing illness all influence effective public health policy making.

7. Healthy Cities: Public Health Through Urban Planning

Mounting scientific evidence highlights the significant role of our cities' built environments in shaping our health and well-being. In this book, the authors conceptualize the urban health niche' as a novel approach to public health and healthy-city planning that integrates the diverse and multi-level health determinants present in a city system. The healthy city model is based on the ‘urban health niche’ in which every individual’s health is based on his or her interaction with three inseparable systems: the individual system, the household/neighborhood/city system, and the governing and decision-making system. In order to have a positive influence on the health outcomes of the members of the urban population – the ways in which cities are laid out, the designations of land use, the transportation infrastructure, and the delivery of supports and services, must work so well together that barriers to access of the supports and services are removed. The authors trace the origins of public health and city planning, drawing upon the shifting paradigms of epidemiology. Advanced network analysis techniques are employed to examine multi-scale associations between individual-level health outcomes and built environment features such as density, land-use mix and road network configuration.

8. Making Healthy Places: Designing and Building for Health, Well-being, and Sustainability

The environment that we construct affects both humans and our natural world in myriad ways. There is a pressing need to create healthy places and to reduce the health threats inherent in places already built. However, there has been little awareness of the adverse effects of what we have constructed-or the positive benefits of well designed built environments.

Like a well-trained doctor, Making Healthy Places presents a diagnosis of--and offers treatment for--problems related to the built environment. Drawing on the latest scientific evidence, with contributions from experts in a range of fields, it imparts a wealth of practical information, with an emphasis on demonstrated and promising solutions to commonly occurring problems.

9.Toward the Healthy City: People, Places, and the Politics of Urban Planning by Jason Corburn

In Toward the Healthy City, Jason Corburn argues that city planning must return to its roots in public health and social justice. The first book to provide a detailed account of how city planning and public health practices can reconnect to address health disparities, Toward the Healthy City offers a new decision-making framework called “healthy city planning” that reframes traditional planning and development issues and offers a new scientific evidence base for participatory action, coalition building, and ongoing monitoring.

To show healthy city planning in action, Corburn examines collaborations between government agencies and community coalitions in the San Francisco Bay area, including efforts to link environmental justice, residents' chronic illnesses, housing and real estate development projects, and planning processes with public health. Initiatives like these go well beyond recent attempts by urban planners to promote public health by changing the design of cities to encourage physical activity. Corburn argues for a broader conception of healthy urban governance that addresses the root causes of health inequities.

10. Cartographies of Disease: Maps, Mapping, and Medicine by Tom Koch

Cartographies of Disease: Maps, Mapping, and Medicine is a comprehensive survey of the technology of mapping and its relationship to the battle against disease. This look at medical mapping advances the argument that maps are not merely representations of spatial realities but a way of thinking about relationships between viral and bacterial communities, human hosts, and the environments in which diseases flourish.

Cartographies of Disease traces the history of medical mapping from its growth in the 19th century during an era of trade and immigration to its renaissance in the 1990s during a new era of globalization. Referencing maps older than John Snow's famous cholera maps of London in the mid-19th century, this survey pulls from the plague maps of the 1600s, while addressing current issues concerning the ability of GIS technology to track diseases worldwide.

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