A Conversation about Cities and Health
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. Titled, “A Conversation About Cities and Health,” the panel, hosted by Sandro Galea, Dean of the School of Public Health, and moderated by Lisa Simpson, the President and CEO of AcademyHealth, was designed around a confluence of conversations around how cities influence health. Dean Galea highlighted that half of the world’s population and 80 percent of Americans live in cities, and cities are uniquely human made entities, and thus provide an immense opportunity to impact the public health of large amounts of people. Cities are becoming our predominant shared experience, shaping the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink, 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 the key information in this field and bring us up to speed on how people and academics think about how cities influence health. Speakers such as 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 spoke about the direction their organizations were taking to talk about and effect public health.
Lusk specifically focused on the results of the Menino Survey of Mayors‘ health component and what mayors talk about when they talk about health. She provides an overview of the survey’s most interesting and consequential findings. The survey seeks to learn what the attitudes and perceptions of the US mayors are and then ground them in truth using statistics and facts about the cities using a representative sample of US Mayors of cities with populations over 75,000.