The power of planning to improve health in entire communities
Billie Giles-Corti: For every 10% increase in the implementation of the policy, people were 53% more likely to walk. They had 22% more likely to have better sense of community, 8% more likely to have better mental health, and 40% less likely to be a victim of crime. Now, goodness! That is a great success story!
Gretchen Miller: Hello, you’re with the Prevention Works podcast. I’m Gretchen Miller, and on this episode: how urban planning, streets, houses, schools, public transport, and open spaces profoundly influence population health. Prevention Works comes to you from The Australian Prevention Partnership Centre. Its focus is chronic disease and the many different areas of research that could help us lower a surprisingly high chronic disease rate in this country.
Billie Giles-Corti: Just to give you a sense of this, in Melbourne by 2050, I think it’s 500 schools that need to be built in the next 30-odd years. That’s just the schools! There’s one suburb that’s got 54 babies a week being born. That’s two classrooms of children. Can you imagine how you deal with that?
Gretchen Miller: Today, Professor Billie Giles-Corti. She’s one of the most cited academics in the world, and one of the Prevention Centre’s Chief Investigators. She’s also the Urban Futures Enabling Capability Platform Director at RMIT University, and she heads up a multidisciplinary team of researchers from universities around the country. And first up, she tells us when she realized the power of planning in the personal health of entire communities.
Billie Giles-Corti: When I was doing my PhD, I needed to get data from the Department of Planning. So, my supervisor and I went in to see the Executive Director and my supervisor made a really good statement to Porferore, who was the Executive Director at the time. He said, “You know, you don’t realize this, but you are a public health organization. You can do more to promote health than we can in the health sector and the decisions that you make will have a profound impact on the health and wellbeing of the people who you’re building those communities for.” And, really, it was a statement that stayed with me, and I thoroughly believe that. The people who build the building environment lay down the foundation for centuries for people. And that will have a profound impact on the people who live there.
So, it’s a really big responsibility. And, I guess, what I see as my role is providing evidence that will support their decision making. I just want now that, now we’re getting an evidence base, a growing evidence base, I think it’s incumbent on the planning profession, on the people who build the cities to actually take notice, to take us back to where we were. Health and planning, completely combined.
Gretchen Miller: You just said, “That would take us back to where we were”. What did you mean by that?
Billie Giles-Corti: Well, if you think about where city planning and public health came from, the roots of that was in industrializing cities around the globe, where people were exposed to environmental pollution from very rapidly industrializing cities, with all the exposure to pollution from there. And also, because the people were very close together, so there was lots of infectious diseases. Water and sanitation? No water and sanitation.
And so, this is where the city … Fathers, really, got together and said, “We’ve got to do something about this. People are unhealthy. They’re dying prematurely- typhoid, cholera. And they’re also being exposed to all this pollution.”
Gretchen Miller: What you’re talking about here is a birth of urban planning with intricately, intimately, inextricably linked to health.
Billie Giles-Corti: Yeah, absolutely. It was the beginning of civil engineering. We started to do water and sanitation and immediately, we saw water-borne diseases diminish. A massive impact. It’s sort of heartbreaking to me that we still have cholera outbreaks, and you think, “Oh my god, this evidence is centuries old! How could that happen?”
But, it was the beginning of public health, civil engineering and city planning. It’s where it all started. And now, we’re looking back to planning and saying, “Hold on. We’ve got diseases of the 21st century, which are the preventable chronic diseases. We cannot afford for you not to be involved in this, because you laid down the foundations for good, health-promoting behaviours.”
It’s really a call to action – to city planners and urban designers, and transport planners – that this needs integrated planning across all the different sectors to create a better future for our populations.
Gretchen Miller: When did they separate?
Billie Giles-Corti: Now, I think it’s happened because we became complacent about the fact that we dealt with the disease, the pollution. And what we did was, because we thought we were doing good … That’s why evaluation is so incredibly important. We had the car, and we had the suburbs. We could spread people out, and we thought that was a fantastic thing. It was going to produce much better outcomes.
It’s interesting actually, if you look at the old maps of cities, what you found was, before the car, we used to plan along the rail. And, you could see, where all the public transport routes, that’s where the houses went. But, of course, when the car came, we thought that we’d solved all the health problems because people were separated. There was no infectious disease. No one really thought about the unintended consequences of that. And, it’s only been way down the track that we can actually see people becoming more socially isolated, people being more separated from land-use. Us not being able to provide the infrastructure because we’re separated so much. We can’t afford to deliver the infrastructure that people need for daily living.
So, it’s really a return to our disciplinary roots, and saying, “Hold on. There is this intricate relationship between health and planning.” That’s the really critical thing. We have to put in place the benchmarking, monitoring and evaluation to make sure that we don’t harm the people that we’re serving.
Gretchen Miller: “Do no harm”.
Billie Giles-Corti: Yeah, well that’s what I’ve often thought. For people who build the city, they should be signing, like the public health people, the doctors, do. “First, do no harm” – The Hippocratic Oath. And I really believe that there needs to be much more paying attention to the fact that, by our actions, we can produce harm. It might be unintended and that’s fine. But, I think we need to think about it.
Gretchen Miller: What you’re saying really here, is the trick is to be open to being multidisciplinary.
Billie Giles-Corti: We have to be multidisciplinary, we have to be self-critical, and we have to be not wedded to our own agenda. And I don’t think we should fear evaluation. We’re all trying to do our best. I work with policy makers all the time, and I know that they are trying to do their best.
Gretchen Miller: As the nation’s expert in the liveability of our various communities – and, indeed, you were Australia’s premiere woman researcher in 2015 – what sort of place do you live, and why is it ideal for you?
Billie Giles-Corti: Well, thank you, Gretchen. I live in a street where we have a little pub down the corner. I’ve got two cafes, which are our locals, they’re four streets away from the swimming pool and I jog down there in the morning when I’m always running late to meet my swimming friend. And, I have Brunswick St., two streets away, and that’s got lots of little shops and services there that I can use. I have a supermarket nearby, which I can walk to with my little shopping trolley. And then, I can walk to work, which is a real privilege. It’s a 25 minute walk, so during the walk to and from work, I have a 50 minute walk a day. Or, I can ride my bike, which is about 15 minutes. And, I have great public transport. I’ve got three different public transport routes that can take me into the city.
So, you can see, I’m completely privileged and I regard it as a highly liveable place. And, it’s surrounded by people with dogs and different types, different age groups, which I always so love, from children through to older people. But, it’s got a real mix of demographics, so I really like that.
Gretchen Miller: So, key to that, then, is community, walkability … And, really, the walkability is everything, isn’t it? Do we take that into account when we’re planning our cities in Australia?
Billie Giles-Corti: I mean, to me, walkability, how walkable your neighbourhood is, the foundation of a good place, of a good city, because it provides the structure. And also, it provides the opportunities, as you say, for people to walk around their neighbourhood. But, if we don’t get the foundation right, a walkable neighbourhood at the heart of a liveable city, then we’ll never get it right. So, very spread-out, you know, cul-de-sacs, very spread out cities, that’s a real problem, because you can’t provide shops and services. So, what you really need is, at the heart of it all, we need to be planning for more compact, higher-density development. I’m not talking high-rise. I don’t mean, you know, having the 20-story building. But, I do mean thinking about how we can design houses that still give the same floor space but are designed in a different way, so that people’s houses are more compact. And, they’ve got a little bit of garden, so that everyone has a garden, that they have then, you know, some parks nearby. But, not too many parks, not too many small parks, because that sucks out, that spreads people apart. So, you want to have people a little bit more compact, so that you can have the shops and services and the public transport that really makes a place liveable.
Gretchen Miller: This is Prevention Works, and we’re talking urban planning and its powerful effect on physical and mental health with professor Billie Giles-Corti. And, I don’t think you can walk through Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Darwin or Adelaide without seeing cranes everywhere, and apartments going up. But, are we really thinking about what we’re doing here? Stay with us, as Billie tells us what we need to plan for as our population grows.
Billie Giles-Corti: Okay, so what we have is, Australia’s population’s going to double by 2050. And that means that we have to plan very carefully. So, there’s two ways of doing that. There’s higher-density and more high-rise in the inner city. And then, thinking about medium-rise to high-rise in the middle suburbs, which have got a lot of amenity. And then there’s also the outer suburban development.
And we need to be thinking about density across each of those areas. A more compact outer suburban development, which means that you’ve got more people to be able to service the shops and services. In the middle-level suburbs, we need to get the density right and locate it well near public, open space, and near where there’s amenity. And in the inner city, we need to be doing the same thing and we need to be thinking very carefully how we do that. If children are going to live there, we need to cater for that. We need to provide age-appropriate things for them to do. Not just the swimming pool and the really fancy things that people tend to put into those high-rise apartments, but actually age-appropriate things. So, if they’re little kids, they need places to play. If they’re teenagers, they need a place, somewhere to bounce a ball.
Gretchen Miller: They also need schools.
Billie Giles-Corti: Absolutely they need schools! And, they need, if we’re really going to make those inner-city places work, what we need- And child care. So, we really need to have that close to home so that people aren’t getting in their cars and traveling. Because, that’s going to put more congestion on the roads.
Gretchen Miller: Are we doing that?
Billie Giles-Corti: We’re trying. And, I think that’s the thing that people don’t get. I always say, you know, “the government’s not Father Christmas” and we have a lot of pushback from the community about how we should be doing things. But the government’s not Father Christmas. Just to give you a sense of this, in Melbourne by 2050, I think it’s 500 schools that need to be built in the next 30-odd years. That’s just the schools. There’s one suburb that’s got 54 babies a week being born. That’s two classrooms of children. Can you imagine how you deal with that?
In terms of the policy frameworks, we’ve done a study across the whole of the country. I don’t believe that we’ve got strong enough policy to create workable, liveable neighbourhoods across the country. I just don’t believe we’ve got quantitative policies that will deliver what we say that we want. They need to be quantitative and they need to be tighter and they need to be evidenced-based and I do not believe we have that.
We do in Perth, for example, we did a big evaluation of what we call a Liveable Neighbourhood Guidelines. This was a new state sub-division design code that was going to create better, more sustainable, more pedestrian friendly neighbourhoods. And so, we did an evaluation of that and what we found was, when we did the evaluation, that the policy was only 47% implemented.
One of my PhD students now, postdoc, Paula Hooper, fantastic piece of work. She went through the policy and she measured all the things that could be quantified and that’s really important because when we’re developing policy that’s going create these neighbourhoods, they need to be quantifiable. So, how much density? How close should things be? And we need to quantify it, not just leave it very open because then it’s open to interpretation. But what she did, she measured everything and what she found was that the policy was only 47% implemented, which you could say “well, that’s a real problem.” But what she also found, which I think is really fascinating, was that for every 10% increase in the implementation of the policy, people were 53% more likely to walk, they had 22% more likely to have better sense of community, 8% more likely to have better mental health and 40% less likely to be a victim of crime. Now goodness, that is a great success story!
What we need to then focus on is, how do we make sure we get good implementation of the policy? So, if we could just get those policies implemented, what we would see is much better health outcomes for the community. We would see people more likely to walk, we’d see better sense of community, we found that there would be better mental health and people being less likely to be a victim of crime. Of course, people feeling unsafe is very bad for people’s health. And then there’d be the long-term health outcomes – those were just the short-term risk factors for health outcomes – so, cardiovascular disease, diabetes two, these sorts of things. We would see much better health outcomes if we were able to deliver that so people would be healthier and happier.
Gretchen Miller: You know all about this because of some ground-breaking research that you’ve done recently which measures right down to the micro scale, and really micro. Tell me about that work.
Billie Giles-Corti: Okay, so we were funded by The Australian Prevention Partnership Centre to do a national study. The National Liveability Study and we’ve defined liveability; we say a liveable a community is safe and socially cohesive, it’s got to be environmentally sustainable, it has affordable housing. But there’s no point in having that affordable housing if it’s not linked by public transport, walking and cycling infrastructure, to all the things that you need for daily living.
You’ve got to be able to get to work, shops and services, schools, all those sorts of social infrastructure, recreational opportunities. So, that was our premise, that’s a liveable community. If your area is extremely liveable, then actually you have a much healthier population and that’s great for everybody. It’s great for taxpayers, it’s great for the community of course, it’s great for your hip pocket. Health is at the basis of all this.
Yeah, so what we wanted to do was see how was the liveability of a neighbourhood associated with health? If you live in a liveable community, was it associated with health? So, our first job was to look at what are the associations between all these elements of liveability, all the different domains of liveability, and health outcomes. So, that’s what we did first. So, then we had an evidence base to go with and then what we did was we mapped it across all the capital cities of Australia. Saying “Do these cities have access to public transport and frequent services? Do they have access to public open space? Do they have access to a walkable community? Do they have access to affordable housing?”
And then we were able to map it, and we’re able to show if this is what we want in our Australian cities, for whom is it being delivered? So, is it everyone that gets access to that or is it just some people? And what we found of course is that it just is some people and it tends to be people who are living in the inner cities, not people living on the urban fringe. So, once you move away from the middle level suburbs and certainly start getting out to the fringe, you’re much less likely to have those things and that’s where the people who live out there often have worse health outcomes. And part of it could be because of the way we’re designing our communities. They’re spending lots of time commuting, they don’t have access to amenities. So, the children don’t have things, they can’t just walk to a tennis court or swimming pool, which you can in the inner city. So we wanted to look at that. So, that’s the sort of thing we’ve been doing and we’ve been able to map it and show it. And it’s quite a graphic when you look at it and think “Wow, that is really telling.” And what we can do then – if people pick it up and we’re obviously promoting and advocating it, and TAPPC has been terrific in advocating it for us – what we can do then is actually benchmark and monitor over time see if we’re changing anything.
Gretchen Miller: So, this actually gets right down to every, what you call “residential parcel” which is in fact a block of land with a home or a block of units on it. You’ve actually measured it right down to that micro scale.
Billie Giles-Corti: Yeah, our question was that if you live in a certain house with certain attributes, then what were the attributes around your neighbourhood that were health promoting? So yes, we’re able to do that for every residential block in Australia where people live and so we were able to show what it’s like living in that neighbourhood.
Gretchen Miller: And what you’ve done is take publicly obvious information like “Is there a supermarket there? How many bottle shops are in the area?”
Billie Giles-Corti: Yes, TAPPC is very interested in the alcohol so whether there’s alcohol both outlets or bottle shops, but also licensed, so where you can go to a hotel or a restaurant. So we’ve got all of that data and we’re able to look at access to healthy food, access to alcohol, access to public open space, affordable housing, access to employment. So yeah, we’ve got quite a great snapshot of Australian cities.
Gretchen Miller: And, of course, the alcohol accessibility isn’t a health- well it is a health indicator but usually a poor health indicator, so everybody might say “Oh, yeah. I’ve got five bottle shops.” That’s not a good thing.
Billie Giles-Corti: No, that’s not a good thing. Well, what we find is that people who have greater access to alcohol are more likely to have health related problems. So, more alcohol consumption, that sort of thing. So, yeah and especially, it’s not actually just the alcohol, if you’ve got no other choice. And that’s the whole point here. So, if you live out of suburban areas and you’ve got no choice but alcohol outlets or gambling outlets which we haven’t measured but would also be another one.
Gretchen Miller: Or fast food outlets.
Billie Giles-Corti: Or fast food. If you’ve got no other choices then that’s the problem. It’s not that it’s anti-having access to alcohol, anti-having access to fast food. It’s just that, it’s always been the way in health promotion that we talk about making the healthy choice the easy choice. And if you’ve only got unhealthy choices, well people obviously will choice those because that’s the main choices. So, this is really about equity. Our study is about equity and how do we create equitable places that are healthy? And giving people every chance to live a healthy lifestyle that they deserve and that we all deserve and will have a major impact on the health and wellbeing of our society.
So, if you’re a disadvantaged person, it’s a budget constraint to have two or three vehicles to be able to mobilize the family. Then it’s not really affordable living. It’s affordable housing often out in the fringe with these big blocks, but it’s not really affordable living because you have to run two or three cars. And the truth is that if we create socially isolating places, that is also bad for our health. There’s quite a lot of studies showing that people who are socially isolated are more likely to die prematurely from heart disease and that sort of thing anyway. Men and women. Men like to think that they’re tough and they don’t really need people, but we find people that are socially isolated, men and women, are more likely to die prematurely. So, I think the social isolation that comes from those environments can also an impediment but for particularly for people who are low-income, it’s a double whammy because they don’t have the money to be able to support themselves, to be able to get around and to have the choices that someone who’s wealthy does.
Gretchen Miller: Talk about the software you use to do this. You used geographic information system software to map the policies to urban areas and to link these policies with residents’ health data. Had that been done before? What were you doing there that was new?
Billie Giles-Corti: We used geographic information systems which is sort of like a mapping software, so it’s a bit like if you have a map but it’s digital, so we can overlay layers of data. So, we can look at the street networks, we can add on top of it the housing lots, where the public open space is, where the shops and services are, where the employment is. So, we can actually have these layers as we mentioned, it’s like a garden of data layers.
People have done this before. They haven’t done it quite the same way that we’ve done it because what we’ve done is we’ve chosen to look at every residential parcel and every capital city in Australia. So every residential lot, every block. Someone will live there, out of all the places we’ve looked at. And we’ve also looked at policy. So, in addition to using the, what we call, evidence-based ones which we found were associated, we also did which I don’t think anyone’s ever done before, is saying “Well, what are the policies that each of the major capital cities are trying to achieve to create liveable communities and are they being delivered?”
So, for example in Sydney, where we are now, its policy is that 100% of households should live within either 400 meters of a bus stop or 800 meters of a train stop and there should be a service every 30 minutes for a bus or 50 minutes for a train. So, we were able to map for whom was that being delivered. Very few people in Sydney achieved that, but we concluded that that was the best policy in Australia. What an aspiration! A fantastic aspiration and what we’ve suggested is that we should have short- and medium-term goals to achieve that. So, I think what we were able to do with this study is do something quite unique, is actually reflect back how we’re going in terms of policy. And just say “Well, it’s great to have policy but is it being implemented?” And I don’t believe anyone’s ever done that before.
Gretchen Miller: So, what is the direct evidence of what you’re saying? If I do live near a park, what’s that going to do to the way I behave and therefore consequently my health?
Billie Giles-Corti: Okay, there’s evidence for both adults and children that if you live near a park, for adults you’re more likely to walk for recreation, you’re more likely to have better mental health outcomes even if you don’t use it and although we haven’t measured it, it also helps to cool the city. Obviously having green space in a city helps to make it cooler and there is other evidence that we haven’t done but other people have. We also find for children the more different types of parks, public open spaces in their area, particularly for adolescent children, the more likely they are to be physically active. If there’s one thing you can do for your health it’s to be physically active. It really is the magic bullet. Even if you’ve got other risk factors, if you’re physically active it really is a magic pill.
Gretchen Miller: You’re with Prevention Works, a podcast all about preventive health from The Australian Prevention Partnership Centre. We’re with Professor Billie Giles-Corti and stay with us as Billie talks about what brought her to this point and when she realized a dramatic shift in approach was needed.
Billie Giles-Corti: Yeah, well, I started out my academic career in around 1992 and in 1986 the World Health Organization had put out its goals for health promotion to its member states and said, “if you want to promote health, these are the six things that you must do,” and two of them were creating healthy public policy and creating supportive environments. Now, creating healthy policy is an interesting one. It’s not creating health policy, it’s creating policy that is healthy across the board; All policy should be health promoting. It was a pretty radical idea at the time. It was ’86 and I was starting my PhD and I started it in ’93 actually and there wasn’t much evidence around that. It was like rhetoric. It was a good idea but there wasn’t much evidence, so here was an opportunity to actually start to measure it. That’s when I got really excited and I started to think, well what sort of behaviours could you look at? I guess at the moment, the pointy end now, where really my objective is in the last phases of my career is to see how much of what we’ve learned over the last 20 years, how much of that can we get translated into policy and practice because I think we know enough. It’s not rocket science, it’s just harder than rocket science to get into policy.
Gretchen Miller: You started off encouraging people to be healthy using what was terribly trendy at the time which was mass marketing. How has that shifted for you?
Billie Giles-Corti: Yes, when I was doing my undergraduate degree I got introduced to marketing and I got very excited. I thought, “Oh yes, we can market health in the same way they can market toothpaste!” I thought, this is it. I actually went into working in market research, so testing out products and testing out packaging, coming out with health messages, coming out with social marketing messages for all sorts of products. One thing I did do in that job was I monitored the beer market nationally and there was a beer war going on between Schwann in the west and Fosters in the east, and Schwann was so excited when we got 1% market share, that was really exciting.
And I started to realize the enormity of the task of just using marketing as the sole thing to change behaviour, because of course in health we want to get massive shifts and that wasn’t going to happen in a hurry. They do work, mass media campaigns do work. We do see over time, if we persist in the same way that Coke does, if you keep on at it and marketing, anti-tobacco’s advertising is a good example of that, we see that you do see change over time but in addition to the communication side there needs to be something else to create an environment that’s supportive.
If you think about diet, for example, we have mass media campaigns saying eat a healthy diet and yet you’ve got so much exposure to an environment that’s unhealthy. You’ve got the food marketers who market unhealthy food products. You go down to the street and you’re bombarded with choices. You have vending machines with unhealthy choices. You are just bombarded. It takes a lot of will to be able to let those health messages cut through. I realized that I needed to do more than that. So, what I started to think, would I be interested in looking at the environment as opposed to just focusing on individuals? Because I think, from an equity point of view, it’s pretty tough if you’re just telling people to eat a healthy diet or to be physically active and then live in a non-supportive environment. I think this is an equity issue and some people are lucky, like I am living in Fitzroy, absolutely privileged. But some people don’t have that choice, they’re not able to walk their child to school and they’re not able to walk to work as I can.
Gretchen Miller: You were the first person, in fact, to measure this?
Billie Giles-Corti: What I think I did was first was actually look at the multiple factors that influence people, because the old models used to be that we used to just focus on knowledge and attitude and the social environments. The new model was that we think about attitudes, social environment, plus the built environment. I think probably I was one of the first people to put in a study all of those things; to measure what people thought, their attitudes, their beliefs, their confidence that they could change their behaviour, what their friends thought, what their family thought, whether they had social support to be physically active, but in addition to that what was their environment like?
What I found was actually quite interesting because when I looked at the relative influence, they’re all relatively the same. If you lived in a supportive environment and you had a positive social environment and you had good attitudes, you were much more likely to be physically active.
Gretchen Miller: The last thing I want to ask you is, how do you get governments to take up your recommendations, because that’s the next step isn’t it?
Billie Giles-Corti: Yeah, it’s very challenging but I think the starting point is actually the way you work with policy makers and practitioners. I like to- and I train my team to work ‘with’ not to work ‘on’, so we’re not evaluating them, we’re working with them to evaluate. I think that’s quite a different thing. It’s easy to point a finger and say that people have got it wrong, it’s much harder to work out why it’s not quite right and what we can do about it. So, I’ve been very fortunate, when I finished my PhD I went back to the Department of Planning and said, “Oh, I finished my study and you gave me some data, I want to show you all about it.”
I was very fortunate to meet a policy maker there who was just designing a new policy, the Liveable Neighbourhood Guidelines, which we ended up evaluating. He was so excited by the evidence that we were creating because he was writing a policy without any evidence base and so he got very excited about what we’re doing because suddenly we were providing evidence that spoke to the things that they were trying to do. So, in the end we evaluated that policy, but we did it with them. Whenever we found the results, the first people who heard about what the findings were, and when things weren’t going the way that they might have expected, was them.
What it meant was that they said, “Well you’re not really benchmarking our policy, we would like you to be benchmarking our policy much more closely.” So, we set up another study that actually went through and that’s when we looked at all the different things that they were trying to achieve and we measured all of those and we could tell them which ones were being implemented and which ones weren’t. What we worked out, it wasn’t the policy leaders that were the problem, it was actually the policy implementation that was the problem. Now, that’s very powerful evidence. If we’d just sat on the sidelines, and said “Oh your policy’s not working, it’s all a big failure,” it’s very easy to do that.
Working out why it’s not working is actually the real challenge, which then they’ve got something to work with. But they didn’t feel, I don’t think that they felt threatened by us because what we were doing was they were part of the journey and we worked ‘with’ and I think that’s a real lesson for people. It’s very easy to throw stones, it’s very difficult to work out what to do and I’m not pretending that I know what to do. I only know what to do by working with the policy makers that I work with and it’s a real pleasure and honour for me to have that opportunity.
Gretchen Miller: It’s been such a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you for your time and I look forward to hearing what happens next.
Billie Giles-Corti: Thank you Gretchen, it’s a real pleasure for me to talk to you too.
Gretchen Miller: This has been Prevention Works, the podcast of The Australian Prevention Partnership Centre. If you’ve enjoyed listening to Professor Billie Giles-Corti, why not check out our conversation with Professor Adrian Bauman, who set to change up how we get physical as a nation. Just go to preventioncenter.org.au and do tell your friends and colleagues all about us. I’m Gretchen Miller, catch you next time.
About this episode
Gretchen Miller sits down with Australia’s leading expert in liveability, Professor Billie Giles-Corti, to talk about how urban planning profoundly influences population health, her ground-breaking National Liveability Study, and whether urban planners, with their huge influence on our health, should take the Hippocratic Oath to ‘do no harm’.
Show notes
Host: Gretchen Miller
Music: The Zeppelin by Blue Dot Sessions is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.