On Tuesday June 4th, IOC Co-Director Katharine Lusk spoke on a panel co-hosted by the Boston University School of Public Health, Initiative on Cities, AcademyHealth, and de Beaumont Foundation. Hosted by Sandro Galea, Dean of the School of Public Health, and moderated by Lisa Simpson, the President and CEO of AcademyHealth, the panel “A Conversation About Cities and Health” focused on how cities influence health. Dean Galea highlighted that half of the world’s population and 80 percent of Americans live in cities; cities are uniquely human made entities, providing a unique opportunity to shape public health. Cities have become our predominant shared experience: shaping the air we breathe; the food we eat; the water we drink; and how we behave, think, and feel. Following the publication of Urban Health and Mayors and the Health of Cities, this event seeks to bring together key information in this field and bring us up to speed on how people and academics think about how cities influence health. Speakers shared the direction their organizations followed to discuss and influence public health: Katharine Lusk, Co-Director of the Boston University Initiative on Cities, Julie Morita, Commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health, LaQuandra Nesbitt, Director of the DC Department of Health, and Sarah Rosen Wartell, President of the Urban Institute.
Lusk highlighted health data from the Menino Survey of Mayors and mayors’ opinions around public health priorities. She provided an overview of the survey’s most interesting and consequential findings. The survey seeks to study the attitudes and perceptions of the US mayors, grounding them in truth using statistics and context about the cities using a representative sample of US Mayors of cities with populations over 75,000.