Nine years ago, the Antiplanner called claims that suburbs caused obesity “junk science.” Research since then has validated that view.
For example, Health and Place journal is focused on “all aspects of health and health care in which place or location matters,” so might be presumed to have a slight bias for an assumption that place influences obesity. Yet it published a 2012 literature review of dozens of papers on the subject that concluded that most failed to account for self-selection bias, that is, that people who might be overweight prefer to live in the suburbs. Thus, any relationship they may have found between weight and suburbia “cannot provide strong support for causality.”
A paper published by MIT’s Center for Advanced Urbanism reviewed several other metastudies that reported “the inconclusive nature of the relation between urban form and public health.” The MIT paper was written specifically in rebuttal to a paper by people associated with the Congress for the New Urbanism, and chided the authors of that paper for failing to disclose their association with that group, “an organization known for certain urban biases linked to their design agendas.”
