Killing you softly

A recent story that’s been making waves in Canada reminds me about one of the great myths in American society today – that suburbs are a safe, healthy place to live. The myth was not always so – 150 years ago in the midst of the industrial revolution the first suburbs, small towns located along railroads, were indeed safer, cleaner and more idyllic than the polluted cities, but times change and today the cities are neither as dangerous nor the suburbs as safe as they were 100 or even 50 years ago. Regrettably, it has been so many generations since suburbs came into being that Americans now take for granted that they represent the ultimate achievement in living the good life. Most simply never think to question the conventional wisdom.

The facts, however, speak to a different reality, as a number of studies since the turn of the millennium have shown. One determined that living in the suburbs makes you fat. Another showed that although crime is indeed slightly higher in urban areas (though not as much as you may think), the incidence of car accidents is so overwhelmingly higher in the suburbs that cities are safer. Another showed that suburban teens are more likely to engage in high-risk behaviors than inner city teens. Yet another has shown that pollution from car exhaust not only aggravates pre-existing conditions, but is itself a major cause of asthma. Connections have also been found between suburbs and problems such as high blood pressure, arthritis and headaches. And then of course there are the whole global warming and dying in a war things, but we won't talk about those today.

In all cases the questions being asked call for additional scrutiny and it would be disingenuous for me to suggest the book is shut on any of them, but even if the findings are perhaps not quite as simple as I’ve made them out to be here, there is clearly a mountain of evidence piling up that Americans should at least be thinking about where they live, rather than going on faith alone.

Tags: urbanism environment society