Body-Conscious Design Approaches in Urban Health

Body-Conscious Design Approaches in Urban Health by Galen Cranz, Professor of the Graduate School, University of California, Berkeley

This lecture encourages urban planners and health researchers to re-think sedentary behaviour, specifically sitting, in public places from the perspective of Body-Conscious Urban Spaces.

This perspective promotes the health of the psycho-physical body, starting with posture, alignment, and movement. It assumes certain values, offers practical operating principles, and accepts any new consequences, visual and otherwise. Sitting is distinctively urban; the practice of sitting in chairs increased in response to global industrialization. Sitting is the foremost contributor to sedentary lifestyle, which has recently been demonstrated to shorten life span.

• Section 1 reviews the anatomical and metabolic problems of sitting in right angle chairs.
• Section 2 introduces the working principles of Body Conscious Design, which can be applied to evaluating all scales from furniture to urban environments.
• Section 3 explores resting postures alternative to right angle sitting, with recent examples in public urban spaces to encourage more thinking and action from both urban design and policy points of view.

The lecture will be followed by a cross-disciplinary workshop for early-career researchers (ECRs), organized by Lecturer Lusi Morhayim and Professor Cranz, to evaluate body-conscious urban space approaches from health and equity perspectives. Participation is limited to 30 attendees, and we welcome participants from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds.

Galen Cranz is Professor of the Graduate School in Architecture at the University of California-Berkeley, a Ph.D. sociologist from the University of Chicago, and a certified teacher of the Alexander Technique. She teaches social-cultural approaches to architecture and urban design, emphasizing user experience. Her publications include Ethnography for Designers (Routledge 2016), Environmental Design Research: Bodies, Cities, and the Buildings Inbetween (Cognella 2010), The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body and Design (WW Norton 2000), The Politics of Park Design: A History of Urban Parks in America (MIT 1982), and “Defining the Sustainable Park: A Fifth Model of Urban Parks,” Landscape Journal (2004). She has participated in several park design competitions including Tschumi's Parc de LaVillette, Paris.

Lusi Morhayim is a Lecturer in Social Sciences of the Built Environment at Bartlett School of Sustainable construction at UCL and a former Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow. Her research examines the connection between users’ cultural, behavioral and cultural needs and the built environment. She is the co-editor of "Revisiting Social Factors: Advancing Research into People and Place." Lusi Morhayim earned her PhD in Architecture from The University of California, Berkeley. Her recent research projects are funded by UCL’s Social Science Plus Award, as well as UCL Grand Challenge of Mental Health & Wellbeing and of Human Wellbeing awards.

This event is supported by the UCL Health of the Public Early Careers Network.

Refreshments will be provided 

*This is an internal UCL event