MANSFIELD, Ohio–Eighteen months ago, when Karyl Price sent an e-mail to the Center for Active Design she knew they could help her, but not quite how.
Price, the project coordinator of the Creating Healthy Communities grant at Richland Public Health, thought the New York City organization could help increase opportunities for physical activity and healthy living for Richland County residents, which is one of the mandates of the grant she oversees.
She turned out to be right. On Thursday, over 30 city and regional planners, health professionals, politicians, philanthropic organizations, and community leaders gathered at Gorman Nature Center for a workshop where they learned more about the principles of active design and how it can be put into practice.
The workshop was facilitated by Suzanne Nienaber of the Center for Active Design and paid for through a series of grants awarded to Richland Public Health.
Nienaber, a graduate of Kenyon College in Mount Vernon and adopted New Yorker of fifteen years was impressed with her first visit to Mansfield. “Your downtown has incredible charm and potential. The architecture is beautiful and it has a great street grid. There are some opportunities to develop more living space and make better use of a large amount of unused surface parking, but the potential is great.”
According to the Active Design Guidelines, active design is “grounded in the idea that the design of the built environment can have a crucial and positive influence on improving public health.” What’s that mean? It means design decisions that get people – sometimes without knowing it – to move their bodies more. Decisions that make staircases more prominent, embrace a “Complete Streets” policy that encourages biking and pedestrian usage, and create more attractive meetings of private and public spaces all fall within the concept of active design.
Richland County residents can use all the help we can get, according to self-reported statistics from the Ohio Department of Health. We have the dubious distinction of being more overweight and sedentary than the the Ohio and national averages. 78 percent of us report being overweight or obese, and 50 percent of us are trying to lose weight. 27 percent of us report that we participate in no leisure-time physical activity. In a national context, Ohio is the tenth most overweight state in the nation.
Nienaber got right to it, facilitating asset mapping exercises and a “Complete Streets” game, both of which were designed to get participants thinking differently about how Mansfielders move around and where openings exist to improve those opportunities. The program continued in the afternoon with a walking audit of Mansfield during which participants made note of street conditions and exchanged ideas for how they could be improved with active design.
Monte Johnson from the Mansfield YMCA participated in the workshop, the first of its kind for him.
“I am just here learning what’s going on in the community and what they are trying to get out of this type of program,” said Johnson.
Matt Stanfield of Field 9 Architecture was also present. He was interested to see active design ideas implemented in Mansfield.
“I’ve been riding my bike in town and walking here for 17 or 18 years,” he said. “Even just the mile walk from my house to where my kids go to school is challenging. A lot of the sidewalks are impassable, the roads are pretty unfriendly to anything but cars. I would like to see some of these cultural shifts made so we can get more people out walking, make it feel safer, and develop the infrastructure we need to support it.”
“Your downtown has incredible charm and potential. The architecture is beautiful and it has a great street grid. There are some opportunities to develop more living space and make better use of a large amount of unused surface parking, but the potential is great,” said Suzanne Nienaber.
