San Antonio Hosts 2nd Annual Public Health & The Built Environment Conference

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Is your city an active town or a strong town? Recently, the City of San Antonio Metropolitan District hosted its second annual Public Health & The Built Environment Conference.

The Healthy Communities by Design conference, which was held at the University of Texas at San Antonio’s downtown campus, brought together planners, architects, public health professionals, students and community members to discuss ways to make streets, neighborhoods and public spaces more inviting and conducive to physical activity.

At the meeting, key note speaker, Chuck Marohn, Co-Founder and President of Strong Towns, spoke of the need to take a different approach to creating safe, healthy, and financially insolvent communities. Instead of investing on road infrastructure that costs millions and so often brings a low return on investment, Marohn described an urgent need to shift our way of thinking.

Rather than wait for city leaders to come up with the right solutions and creating a dependency on public subsidies, Marohn encouraged attendees to begin with the smaller changes and to start building walkable communities using a bottom-up approach.

John Simmerman, President of Active Towns, also spoke at the conference.

He shared his account of traveling to some of the country’s most healthy and active cities during the Active Towns Tour.

According to Simmerman: “Active towns are inviting & invigorating environments, which help to encourage and support healthy active lifestyles.”

In order to see the change, Simmerman encouraged the audience to be the change by modeling a healthy and active lifestyle.

In addition to the great presentations by national speakers, local community members who are making a difference also presented at the built environment conference. Some of those local leaders included Salud Heroes, like Beth Keel of the San Antonio Housing Authority and Dante Jones of the Roll Models.

The conference was sponsored by partners from UTSA, the American Institute of Architects – San Antonio Chapter, the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio’s (UTHSCSA) Institute for Health Promotion Research (IHPR), UTSA College of Architecture, and various City of San Antonio departments.

For more on the 2nd Annual Public Health and the Built Environment Conference, view the full webcast here.

Learn about healthy changes lead by local community members in the Salud Hero story: Monthly Bike Ride Program Gets More San Antonio Kids on Bikes.