11
O P I N I O N
The New Grand Strategy, extended The idea of sustainability has to expand to include the development of buildings that promote healthy outcomes for the public.
A fter reading Ed Friedrichs’ article, “The New Grand Strategy,” I was inclined to email him and suggest a complementary extension of our “national strategic imperative.” Consider, if you will, an expanded definition of sustainability that focuses not just on the built environment, but one that includes the people who use it. When designers and developers do so, we are rewarded with positive health outcomes in addition to the environmental benefits associated with walkable communities, regenerative agriculture, and resource productivity – just as Mark “Puck” Mykleby describes in his book, The New Grand Strategy – Restoring America’s Prosperity, Security and Sustainability in the 21st Century .
Tim McCarthy
19th and early 20th centuries, what if the design choices we make now addressed the chronic conditions of today – obesity, heart disease, and isolation? Can the idea of sustainability extend “Consider, if you will, an expanded definition of sustainability that focuses not just on the built environment, but one that includes the people who use it.”
We need healthy approaches to place making. The vast and ever-increasing percentage of GDP expenditure on reactive health care – live one’s life, get sick, treat the symptoms – must leverage architecture, planning, and development to proactively create the latent conditions in the built environment that improve health outcomes, slowing down or potentially reducing the growth of GDP spending on traditional, reactive healthcare. (Global Economist Thierry Malleret estimates that over the next 20 years, total global healthcare expenditures on the treatment of chronic disease will total $47 trillion.) As design helped conquer the epidemics of late
See TIM MCCARTHY, page 12
THE ZWEIG LETTER July 17, 2017, ISSUE 1208
Made with FlippingBook Annual report