World Obesity Day - March 4, 2025 - The Nature of Things - Weight of the World

This past Tuesday was World Obesity Day. Like many people, I struggle with maintaining my weight at an acceptable level. But my interest in obesity is as much professional as it is personal. That is because in 2003, I participated in the production of a documentary film featured on David Suzuki's The Nature of Things that examined how good planning can reduce obesity. I would like to share some background as to how this came about.

In 1999, I was appointed President and CEO of a new corporation established to develop approximately 200 acres of land adjacent to the Simon Fraser University campus on Burnaby Mountain. The goal of the development was to enhance campus life and generate revenue for various university programs. I thought there was also an opportunity to undertake a more exemplary type of development compared to that usually created by the private sector. In our case, we wanted to create a truly sustainable community. Yes, I know it's an overused word today, but in 1999 this was still a somewhat novel idea.

In 2002 I received an invitation to attend the 2nd Annuall New Partners for Smart Growth  planning conference in New Orleans. The theme was building safe, healthy and livable communities and since we were wanting to create a livable community and since I had never been to New Orleans, it seemed like a worthwhile conference to attend.

Upon arrival, I recall looking at the program and noticing a lot of the speakers were doctor this and doctor that. I assumed they were simply pretentious academics until I attended the first session and realized they were medical doctors. At first I was suprised until I remembered that the origins of planning and zoning were all about maintaining good health - separating the noxious industrial uses from residential areas and so on.

However, at this conference, the topics were much broader. As noted in the program:

"The purpose of this conference is to educate a broad range of practitioners in how we can redesign existing urban neighborhoods and improve the design of new neighborhoods to create safe, walkable, bikeable urban environments. Doing so will improve public health by increasing physical activity, reducing air and water pollution, decreasing violent crime, and reducing the number of pedestrian traffic accidents."

I returned from the conference truly inspired. While many of the concepts discussed at the conference were already incorporated in the master plan developed by Norm Hotson and Margot Long and others, we refined our planning approach and designs to a more fully create a healthy community. This included introducing a community transit pass that would allow residents to travel on public transit throughout the region at a fraction of the cost of a regular three-zone pass. 

We also decided to ban fast food restaurants in favour of restaurants that served healthy food. This meant no McDonalds, no Burger Kings, etc.

I started to go around giving talks about this and Glynnis Whiting, a documentary film maker heard about this. She was in the process of making a film for the National Film Board on how good planning can contribute to good healthy. She had already lined up Stockholm's Dr. Stephan Rossner, an obesity specialist, and Dr. Lawrence Frank, a UBC professor who had written books on the correlation between good planning and good health. His studies revealed that people who lived in higher density neighbourhoods that promoted walking were healthier than those in car-dependent low-density suburban neighbourhoods.

The program aired on December 3, 2003 titled "The Weight of the World". I must confess that while I have always thought highly of my work, never in my wildest dreams did I expect to hear David Suzuki telling a national audience about the good work I was doing as a property developer!

You can watch the video here. https://www.nfb.ca/film/weight_of_the_world/