“There has been an inaccurate theory that, as the world became more online, we would become less connected to our neighborhoods.”
Developer Jonathan Rose and physician Dr. Prabhjot Singh each published books infused with systems thinking in 2016. Rose’s The Well-Tempered City offers a model for how to design our cities in ways that increase the equality, resilience, adaptability, and well-being of its residents. Singh’s Dying and Living in the Neighborhood takes a look at the healthcare system by stepping outside the walls of hospitals and clinics and into the neighborhoods where the health of communities is actually determined.
In the following conversation, Rose and Singh discuss the relationship between individuals and systems, the need to bring their different fields into meaningful dialogue, and the importance of having an aspirational vision for the future.
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Jonathan: Everything is nested. People are nested in families and in social systems. They’re nested in neighborhoods, and the neighborhoods are nested in larger cities. There has been an inaccurate theory that, as the world became more online, we would become less connected to our neighborhoods. That didn’t happen. I think we’ve found that being online can expand our neighborhood, but the physical place itself still deeply matters to who we are and to our health and well-being.
Prabhjot: This reminds me, I recently read that Amazon is starting to open up brick-and-mortar stores. You’ve also got online food delivery companies that are starting to open physical stores again. It’s almost like being embedded in a physical world is, like bellbottoms, back in style. It also makes you think about the last 10 or 20 years as being, in some ways, like an interesting bubble or anomaly where we truly believed that we were going to be untethered from place.
It’s a bit of a rude awakening because, in many ways, this attitude has untethered us from being healthier as a society. Those things seem to be related to each other.
Jonathan: I believe they are. The Trust for Public Land has promoted the idea that access to parks and open space improve our health. We know that when people are in parks their mental health improves, but they also exercise more. They started saying everybody should be within a 10 minute walk of a park and then they created something called “Park Score,” which actually measured that on the map.
What they discovered is that if you live in a neighborhood where there is a gang line between you and the park, you can’t get there. Or if there’s a lot of drug dealing in a certain place or a dangerous corner then, even though it may be 10 minutes by map, it may be 20 or 30 minutes by social reality.
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