Healthy cities for the Bay Area

What is a healthy city?

The answer is complex. Sometimes we use the phrase to focus on human health: a city with a minimum of disease and injuries, where the air is safe to breathe and the water is safe for drinking and swimming and for fishingpeople to eat their catch. The people who most often bear the brunt of unhealthy conditions tend to be poor and members of minority groups, and so healthy cities require an emphasis on environmental justice.

Sometimes we emphasize achieving ecological health: a city where plants and animals, especially the native ones, can survive and even thrive amidst all the humans. Strategies to achieve ecological health range from national campaigns to appropriate plantings in our own back yards.

Another aspect of both human and ecological health is to minimize the negative impacts of the city on non-urban areas, both surrounding greenbelt lands and the world as a whole. Our transportation and smart-growth activists focus on developing patterns of compact living in cities that reduce pressures to develop sprawl housing in the greenbelt. We also seek to encourage people to reduce their consumption of resources, including construction materials, water, and fossil fuels used for driving and energy supplies. This line of thought leads to the concept of sustainability.

The articles in this Yodeler are by no means comprehensive, but they represent some of the efforts of the Sierra Club Bay Chapter and others to advance the health - all kinds of health - of our cities.

We open with an article by Rajiv Bhatia, director for occupational and environmental health for the San Francisco Department of Public Health, telling of his department's pioneering efforts to bridge the gap between health policy and city planning. Then follow case studies of two San Francisco neighborhoods which have made significant strides in planning for healthy communities: the South-of- Market area and the Market-Octavia neighborhood. A further case study describes efforts to create "interesting urban places" in the very different cityscape of the office parks of North San Jose.

Next we focus on specific types of development. The Sierra Club's new report "Better Building: A Guide to America's Best New Development Projects" highlights innovative new development projects for building healthy, livable communities. An accompanying article details Bay Chapter efforts to support specific local affordable-housing efforts.

Then we look at the health of nature in the city. San Francisco makes valuable ongoing efforts to protect and care for its natural areas. Further, Nature in the City is a new organization dedicated to conservation and stewardship of San Francisco's biodiversity. Josiah Clark and Peter Brastow tell of the new organization - and of coyotes in the city. Joe Eaton provides an East Bay balance with an account of wild geese and turkeys at Lake Merritt and People's Park.

We also cover specific development projects where activists are making a healthy difference. The planning process for Treasure and Yerba Buena Islands has the potential to develop a model sustainable community; the most recent land-use concept for the islands exemplifies compact development, but the draft transportation plan still has some roadblocks to overcome. In Hercules, Wal-Mart has withdrawn a development proposal that threatens years of planning for a better city; we fear, however, that the corporation will return with a modified plan.

Most of the articles in every Yodeler in the Conservation News section relate to some aspect of healthy cities. In this issue, for example, we have Berkeley's efforts to protect its creeks and plan its downtown. The Bay Chapter is gathering signatures for two ballot initiatives to preserve ecologically important lands on the edge of our urban area, in Fremont to protect Patterson Ranch, and in Albany to plan for the shoreline. In San Francisco we seem close to success in blocking the Mills Corporation's proposal to build a mega-mall at Piers 27 - 31. We have briefs of other San Francisco items and of Oakland planning efforts. Especially pleasing is the successful effort in Richmond to pass a more appropriate ordinance to oversee construction projects at the immense Chevron refinery.

The Volunteer section, too, is mostly about healthy cities. This month's volunteer of the month is Joyce Roy, who campaigns tirelessly for healthy development in Oakland. We commemorate, with an excerpt from a new Sierra Club book, the recent death of Jean Siri, whose efforts touched on almost every aspect of making our cities healthier.

Read about these efforts to create healthier cities, and join in the Bay Chapter's efforts to make our cities healthier - for our families, for our future.

Donald Forman