Does driving make you fat? Does taking transit make you thin? Are you likely to be healthier in a city with small blocks or big blocks? Are you less likely to get diabetes if you live near a park? Do you breathe more pollutants in heavy traffic on a bike or in a car? What urban form is healthier when you’re a teenager or a senior? Are you likely to have more friends if you live in a walkable neighborhood? What health-related economic benefits do you receive from walkability, bikeways, and greenways? How do you measure these things? One of the most cited scholars in the world, Dr. Lawrence Frank coined the term walkability and has been answering such questions for three decades. After sharing the state of the evidence linking built and natural environment features with health and economics, he and Yilun Zha will discuss the findings’ impacts on cities and public health.

Dr. Frank specializes in the interaction between land use, travel behavior, air quality and the health, energy use and climate change impacts of urban form policies. He is a “walkability pioneer” and first to quantify connections between built environment, active transportation, and health. He coined the term “walkability” in the early 90’s and his work led to WalkScore and has been cited over 58,000 times. He has been listed in Thompson and Reuter’s top 1% in the social sciences. Dr. Frank has published over 200 peer reviewed articles and reports and co-authored Heath and Community Design and Urban Sprawl and Public Health. In the late 90s Dr. Frank founded Urban Design 4 Health, Inc. to help decision makers.

Yilun Zha is a graduating PhD Candidate at Georgia Tech and an urban designer with an enthusiasm to use the “foodscape” as a leverage for creating healthier cities. As a researcher at the SimTigrate Design Center, he has contributed to various federally and locally funded projects investigating the health equity implications of farmers markets, on-demand transit, and online grocery delivery. His broader research examines the multifaceted ways in which food places, cities, and human experiences interconnect and shape each other. Yilun holds degrees in Statistics from Georgia Tech and City Planning from Tongji University