Walking Into Trouble: Planning and Physical Un-Fitness
by John Stilgoe
Historian John Stilgoe reflects on why the growing "unfitness" of Americans is something planning board members should be concerned about.
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Gone barefoot lately? Every planner owns a vested interest in
the question, and especially in the answer. Walking barefoot
means more than heeding the fading echoes of a long-ago Broadway
musical, or aping romantic-evening advertisements for Caribbean
beach resorts. It means intimate contact with ordinary
landscape, even intimate contact with the wilderness of mountain
meadows or sandy beaches. And it means something disappearing
from contemporary American life.
Direct physical contact with
physical environments decreases yearly, and erodes entire
sections of the unseen, taken-for-granted foundations of
planning. Behind arguments concerning subdivision guidelines,
downtown revitalization, ecological imperatives and other
important issues snuffles something equally important but often
offensive, certainly distasteful, always unnerving to scholar
and planner alike. An age wary of unjust discrimination and
unthinking offensiveness, deals hesitantly with the question of
physicality, and often prefers to ignore it altogether. ...
Even the Centers for Disease Control, a federal institution
increasingly worried about the inactivity and obesity of the
American public, and especially the young public, has sounded
the alarm. Heart disease is now a pediatric disease, and
practicing physicians discover every day that more and more
patients -- children included -- get no daily exercise. Sitting
in front of video screens at work and at home produces
overweight people headed for significant medical trouble, as the
President's Council now warns in its press releases. Back
problems, respiratory problems, leg problems, all such derive in
large part from a lack of exercise undreamed of in the 1960s.
...