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Integrating Health and Fairness into Duluth’s Comprehensive Plan
Citation:
Bolgrien, Dave, K. Williams, J. Carlson, A. Fulton, AND S. Witherspoon. Integrating Health and Fairness into Duluth’s Comprehensive Plan. St. Louis River Summit, Superior, WI, March 14 - 15, 2017.
Impact/Purpose:
This presentation explains the importance of participatory processes for integrating health and fairness into community comprehensive planning.
Description:
Cities of the Great Lakes are innovators in comprehensive ecosystem-focused urban planning. Beginning with the Plan of Chicago, comprehensive plans have been expressions of a community’s vision for the future, particularly regarding the use of waterfronts. Like Chicago in 1909, Duluth is currently using comprehensive planning (Imagine Duluth 2035) to reclaim its riverfront and estuary for the public good. In addition to traditional issues of land use, transportation, housing, and economic development, Duluth is integrating principles of fairness and health into Imagine Duluth 2035. The challenges are to 1) understand health and fairness as both determinants and outcomes of environmental, social, and economic conditions, and 2) connect health and fairness to the City’s sphere of influence. The City has conducted two public input processes to meet these challenges; structured exercises at a public meeting and a survey of residents conducted by the Health in All Policies Coalition. Results from the public meeting showed that “access” was the most frequently used descriptor common to both health and fairness. Access to health care, transportation, housing, and employment were critical common elements that are well established determinants of health. Access to information was more important to fairness than to health. This suggests that that fairness thrives when communities are information-empowered. Access to the environment was more important to health than to fairness. This suggests that people understand and desire the physical and mental health benefits from a clean environment, public green space, recreational amenities, and ecosystem services. Multi-agency remediation, restoration, and revitalization projects in the AOC and the river corridor can apply the lesson of Imagine Duluth 2035 that fairness and health in a community depend on access to information and a clean environment, respectively.