I had to miss my Engineering class today to attend the First Annual Symposium On Health & The Built Environment in El Dorado Hills (September 14, 2007). Using El Dorado County as the backdrop, many of the ideas could be applied elsewhere.
I must say that it was a pretty good symposium despite some reservations that I had before today. I thought it would be a wild environmental fest with everyone complaining about global warming and such. It wasn’t like that at all. Sure, global warming was mentioned, but the bulk of the ideas involved more realistic problems like the importance of good sidewalks, the proximity of supermarkets in communities, and alternate transportation methods.
The best speaker was Prof. Richard Jackson MD who gave the keynote address “How Design Impacts Health” on the integral part that Public Health has on society. It’s not just some department that tries to curtail everything, but a very useful body to make urban planning more useful and efficient.
The symposium was sponsored by the El Dorado County Departments of Public Health and Development Services. The weird thing was that I also had to sign a waiver form because they were filming the symposium for a possible future documentary. Click here to view the event’s flyer.
Here are a couple of images that were in Prof. Jackson’s Powerpoint presentation:
Okay, well there’s just one image. I can’t find the other, but it’s a man walking his dog while driving in his SUV.