McGill University Comparative Health Systems Program, March 2016
Lecture at the “Our City, Our Health” Symposium, Montreal
As part of the annual event Our City, Our Health, the presentation focuses on the built iterations that challenge the intense relationship between architecture and health. Titled “Constructing Health. A Catalogue of Architectural Imaginations”, it demonstrates the importance of imagining the changing urban fabric as field of intellectual and creative investigation. Can one imagine a building made of dust particles, or a billboard that collects pollen? As health experts formulate concerns with present day living environments, landscape architects and urbanists start to investigate the complexity of emerging health problems through design. Imagining our built environment as test ground, these experts have come up with energetic, radical and critical projects that open up the imagination of what it means to “construct” health. The research features case studies by Assemble, Charles Jencks, Lynne Cohen, Junya Ishigami, Le Corbusier, the City and County of San Francisco, and many more.
“As we embark on the 21st century, our most serious health hazards come not from infectious diseases, but from chronic diseases, such as diabetes, that result more from our modern lifestyle than from any external threat of infection. We face the apparently overwhelming challenges of rapidly increasing urbanism and the effects of the growing human population on our environment. These challenges would make any urban designer envious of what now seems the relative simplicity of the problems faced in the 19th century and before.” David Burney, Imperfect Health, Imperfect Environment, 2012.