You’ve probably heard about the Green Building Council – a group that introduced LEED certification to reward and encourage environmentally friendly construction. Now, the University of Virginia is teaming up with the council to create guidelines for designing healthy homes, buildings and communities.
When Dr. Matthew Trowbridge first began his pediatric practice, he thought a lot about how to protect children from sickness and injury.
“ Prevention is really the number one thing, and as I started to look around at killers of young kids, they were things like motor vehicle crashes, and I realized that the way we build our communities had not been really looked at in a systematic way.”
And today, as a professor at UVA’s school of medicine, he’s thinking about how to design cities and neighborhoods where children and adults can lead healthy lives.
“We can think about our buildings, our neighborhoods, our cities as platforms for wellness delivery. If you want people to get more daily physical activity, to get out and see their neighbors more, a prerequisite is that is that there needs to be a safe place for them to do that – that’s easy and fun and accessible.”
He says the nation needs to develop a system for guiding and rewarding the real estate industry when it brings healthy places to market – much as the U.S. Green Building Council has done with LEED certification.
“ We need to define best practices for project teams, architects, urban planners, and – importantly, provide a very clear recognition structure. They know that if they do those best practices, they will also be recognized within the market.”
And, in fact, UVA in partnership with the Green Building Council won a $1.2 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to get this idea off the ground over the next three years.
