Cedar Rapids named Blue Zones community

The City of Cedar Rapids celebrated its designation as a Blue Zones Community yesterday evening with a gala celebration at the Downtown YMCA. Mayor Ron Corbett, along with representatives from the Blue Zones organization and Wellmark Blue Cross Blue Shield (which spearheaded the initial efforts), spoke at a brief ceremony.



Mayor Corbett, in recognizing participating volunteers from the community, praised the "grass-roots efforts" that led to the city's achievement. He noted "It was never meant to be a top-down effort," and promised "This is really just the beginning" of efforts to promote health and happiness. He pointed out Cedar Rapids is the largest city in Iowa with a Blue Zones designation. In your face, Des Moines.

Community organizations representing the nine Blue Zones ideals were located at stations around the gym and racquetball courts. Groups ranged from medical offices to churches to social services. Here, Taylor Bergen chats up visitors about the Ultimate Frisbee team:

Hy-Vee, all seven of whose Cedar Rapids grocery stores have achieved Blue Zones designations, offered healthy snack samples and hosted cooking demonstrations.

There were demonstrations of fun ways to get moving, in which attendees enthusiastically joined.


All told, it was an impressive mobilization of community organizations.

By now, 56 worksites, 36 restaurants, and 18 schools have fulfilled the requirements for Blue Zones designation. 22000 individuals have made some level of commitment to attaining Blue Zones goals. The impacts can be seen in new ways (which are actually older ways) of thinking about how we design our cities, and the kinds of food we choose and offer to others. It seems to be having an effect on how people think about community as well, which is all to the good.


EARLIER POSTS
"Am I Blue," 4 June 2013
"Dan Burden on Sidewalks and the Future," 13 December 2015

Dan Burden on sidewalks and the future

Dan Burden at CSPS Hall

 I would never walk. I would take a car.

--DR. SEUSS, "ONE FISH TWO FISH RED FISH BLUE FISH"

Dan Burden of Blue Zones praised both sidewalks and the City of Cedar Rapids's plans to include them in development in a talk at CSPS Hall last week. Burden, director of innovation and inspiration for Blue Zones, talked up both the social and economic benefits of complete streets, which he said "address all the needs of all the people all the time" instead of focusing exclusively on efficient flow of automobile traffic.

Burden said modifying the streetscape was an essential element of Blue Zones' efforts in Albert Lea, Minnesota, which helped bring about dramatic improvements in health spending and work productivity. Economically, he argued complete streets produce 4-5 times the revenue per square foot than auto-oriented streets; add value to homes at several times the cost of constructing a sidewalk and planting street trees; and, with more compact development provide more efficient use of city services such as the fire department. Socially, walkability addresses a basic human impulse: Walking, he says, is the first thing an infant wants to do on its own, and the last thing an older person wants to give up. It gives everyone a chance to exercise and meet more people, allows elders to age in place independently, and sustains the quality of neighborhoods.

Sidewalks are, of course, not an end in themselves but a means to an end, and should be pursued with an eye towards cost-effectiveness as well as "completing the system." That means intentionally constructing a network of sidewalks in places with the potential of generating "places to go to." He showed a poignant picture of the sidewalk in front of his childhood home, which his father had built himself. Neither their neighbors nor their city took it from there, though, and it remains, seven decades later, a very short stub of cement in front of one house. Effective sidewalks connect people and destinations, with "eyes on the sidewalk" along the way (i.e. windows not garages or fences). They make for a smaller life radius, defined as the area where 90 percent of the things you do are found. (In traditional urban development, this might be a mile or two, so accessible multiple ways including walking; in suburban sprawl, several dozen miles, so accessible only by car.)

Burden, joined by city staff in a question-and-answer session after the talk, stayed positive and general, as befits an inspirational speaker. But we missed an opportunity to engage the crux of the sidewalk construction issue when an audience member questioned plans to extend the sidewalk along the south side of Grande Ave SE. (I live near there and know the speaker, but will leave it to him to identify himself if he chooses.) Grande runs for about a mile, beginning at 16th Street in Wellington Heights, through some quite toney blocks, and terminating in Bever Park. The sidewalk along the north side runs the entire route; on the south side it ends at 21st Street, about halfway along. This year, a city proposal to build the rest of the sidewalk met with near-unanimous opposition from homeowners on both sides of the street. The speaker argued the added sidewalk would be redundant, given the existing sidewalk along the north side of Grande, but mostly that it would be "disruptive."

Residents on Chandler Street SW, which leads to Jefferson High School,
are fighting city plans to build sidewalks (Bing maps)

It's an important reminder that the case for walkable cities, and for sidewalks as a means of walkability, is far from being a slam dunk. Not everyone wants to meet more people, or to live in a connected community, or not to rely on their car(s) to take them everywhere they need to go. Burden is in my view absolutely right when he says "an uncertain future will require more collaboration than we're used to," but not everyone believes that or wants to believe that. This particular speaker is in his 80s, but even people my age and younger believe primarily in the suburban values of beauty, privacy and security (made famous in the Chicagoland of my youth by the Tru-Link Fence Company). There are fiscal. environmental, social and soulful reasons for backing off on those suburban values, but to say the least some people remain unimpressed. How can such mindsets be reached, much less convinced of the desirability of building connected communities? Will developing successful examples, to the extent it's politically feasible, help?

Am I blue

The City of Cedar Rapids is participating in the Blue Zones Project, a nationwide initiative run out of Tennessee by Healthways Inc., and sponsored in Iowa by Wellmark Blue Cross Blue Shield (by far the largest health insurance provider in the state). Blue Zones promotes healthy living through exercise, dietary choices and positive attitudes. (The Blue Zones folk tend to longer lists, like the Power 9 list of healthy lifestyle habits, and the 11 Blueprint sections at last night's open house. Anyone who's taken my classes knows that a list of more than five things makes me woozy, so I have condensed it down to three major areas.)

Monday night there was an open house at Coe College. Volunteers from Blue Zones, the city, and maybe other organizations solicited opinions from visitors. Look at all the blue t-shirts!

Blue Zones operates a wide range of initiatives, seemingly on the theory that if they can start people talking about a variety of dimensions of healthy living, and achieve results on even a few of them, they will have done a great deal of good. I like that theory.

City design is one of their areas of interest, as indeed it is one of mine. From their website:

A community's streets, sidewalks and trails help people bike and walk more. Many cities have used the same techniques as the Blue Zones Project™ does to increase pedestrian and bike safety in roads, expand and build bike lanes and maintain sidewalks. These kinds of improvements allow for great sources of exercise for individuals and makes a community more livable overall.

Many people in Cedar Rapids are already using such pathways to get some exercise--some just because they feel like it, and a greater number because they own dogs. This is definitely something to be said in favor of dogs, who need walks throughout the year, and not just when it's nice out as it is now.

In trying to get more people to exercise, Blue Zones focuses on persuasion as well as more/better pathways. That may not work, though, for many people who don't own dogs and aren't self-motivated to walk. What they need is some place to go that's easiest to get to on foot. A lot of areas in any city as sprawled as Cedar Rapids don't have anything like that. Even in my close-in neighborhood, the only place within a five-minute walk is Brucemore (which admittedly is pretty special). Better city design needs not only more sidewalks and bike lanes, but more places to walk and bike to. [As I waited to write on the comment sheet, I noticed the woman in front of me was the first one to mention needing places to walk. Points for her! But then she used the example of the walking area at the proposed redesign of Westdale, which will in fact be a walking area you can only get to by car. Arggh.]

Along the same lines, Blue Zones encourages work places to provide exercise areas for employees and time to use them. Coe rocks in this area, with our pool, racquet courts, and two workout rooms. We are a college with traditional-age students, after all. But I think businesses can help a lot just by where they choose to locate. To pick unfairly on one business, Aegon USA might well have all that stuff, but they're on their own huge campus a long way from anywhere. Just to get across the parking lot is a long walk. Contrast that with CRST, which is locating their new office downtown. Even if they don't have fancy exercise equipment, they're close to restaurants, coffee houses and other places people can walk to on their lunch hours a lot more easily than they can drive anywhere.

One of the interesting walking ideas Blue Zones is promoting is the "walking school bus," where parents and/or community volunteers escort children to their neighborhood school.

(a "walking school bus" in action, from the Blue Zones website)

I think this is a great idea, and if I didn't typically have to be at work before school starts I would cheerfully volunteer. One problem is schools like the recently-built Viola Gibson School, located on busy and unwalkable Blairs Ferry Road. Another problem, in fact the problem in my own neighborhood, is that parents tend to opt out of Johnson School, even though it's about three blocks away, because it has been designated a School In Need of Assistance. So they drive their children to schools farther away.

Conversations about healthy living are conversations worth having. A lot can be done without persuasion, which some may consider to be scolding, if we pay attention to what Hester (Design for Ecological Democracy, 2006) calls "impelling form."