Health by Design

At Penn, collaboration occurs fortuitously and with impact. In 2010, I had the opportunity to partner with Marilyn Jordan Taylor, who is dean of Penn’s School of Design, and City Planning Professor Genie Birch to host the 18th International Council on Women’s Health Issues (ICOWHI) conference. The topic was “Cities and Women’s Health: Global Perspectives,” one of my deepest passions. Attracting more than 350 participants from more than 30 countries, the conference proved a launching pad for new approaches to urban women’s health.

The conference inspired a book, Women’s Health and the World’s Cities, which I was thrilled to co-edit with Professor Birch and Professor Susan Wachter of Penn’s Wharton School. We are pleased to present the book on January 24 from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. in Penn’s Houston Hall.

For Women’s Health and the World’s Cities, we called on scholars and practitioners from the fields of urban planning, global studies, and health sciences to consider urban planning from the perspective of women’s health and to examine the effect of urbanization on women and their health.

The chapter “Transforming Urban Environments” resonates with this imperative. Penn Nursing’s Jeane Ann Grisso and colleagues identify women from Philadelphia to Manila who have led community change. “They organize, demand services, and support one another,” the authors write. “The tenacity and commitment of women leaders, in partnership with diverse stakeholders, can lead to profound urban transformation. . . . In spite of daunting realities, women in poor urban communities continue to organize to create better lives for themselves and their children.”

As urban populations continue to expand at an unprecedented rate, the demand for our communities to be responsive and adaptive to citizens’ health needs is greater than ever. This urgent need for intervention is both health-related and dependent on the fundamental systemic needs of issues like human shelter and clean drinking water. The impact of urban living is especially felt by women as gender biases, economic disparities, outmoded infrastructure, and safety threats. Reduced access to healthcare and other resources can conspire to produce dire health outcomes.

Women play critical and multiple roles in societies as mothers, leaders, students, decision-makers, voters, and workers. Health research combined with design, business, and other areas of study and expertise here at Penn are creating an increasingly influential body of work that can serve to aid and empower not only women, but the individuals and families they care for and the communities in which they live.