Urban Planning, Public Health, and the Human Costs of Economic Change

Abstract

The thesis of this article is that the interests of both urban planning and public health will be served by developing a common understanding of the health effects of increased mobility of capital and labor. It is argued that practical and theoretical developments make this understanding more possible and important now than at any time in the recent past The major substantive and methodological components of a common research agenda and curriculum reform are also suggested.

The interaction of stressful life events and chronic strains on community mental health

“…One of the more important yet largely unresearched predictions of the original physiologically based model of stress was that an individual's capacity to cope with a stressor would be influenced, among several factors, by the demands placed upon that person by other sources of environmental stress (Selye, 1956). To put it in alternative terms, if the effects of various social and physical stressors in the environment share some common mechanism of impact, one cost of coping with environmental demands is reduced capacity to respond to ensuing adaptive challenges (Catalano, 1984;Dubos, 1965;Fleming, Baum, & Singer, 1984).…”