Our Surroundings, Ourselves

This chapter examines how the features of the built environment affect health and safety. It focuses on why and how the design of places shapes people's lived experience. Moreover, it introduces an emerging scientific movement concerned with the way changes to the built environment, from buildings and parks to streets, impact health and safety. Changing places is one of the best ways to produce sustained improvements in well-being for large groups of people over long periods of time. Certain characteristics of place-based designs can be chosen to maximize success. Altering the structures of the built environment to basic principles of simplicity, scalability, and ease of use can be employed as a model for producing place-based changes that have the most significant and lasting impact. The chapter then illustrates why place-based strategies should be among the first set of policy choices for enhancing the health and safety of urban residents.