Slum Upgrading in Nairobi

Our UC Berkeley team of students recently completed research, field work and a report with our partners in Kenya, Pamoja Trust and the University of Nairobi, offering plans and recommendations for upgrading and securing land tenure for slum dwellers in the Mathare Slum of Nairobi.  See our web site for more detailed information:
http://sites.google.com/site/mathareucberkeley/Home

Community-University partnerships

Creating more healthy places will require new partnerships between large institutions like universities and communities. There are far too many examples of universities literally bulldozing their neighbors (often the poor and people of color) in the name of "higher education." As importantly, the neighborhoods surrounding many elite universities (e.g., Columbia and West Harlem, Roxbury/Dorchester and Harvard, Baltimore and Johns Hopkins) have not benefited from the jobs, health services and other benefits their university neighbors could provide.

See a short video describing a better way forward to ensure universities are better partners with their neighboring communities:

http://intranet.media.berkeley.edu/videos/~xfers_temp/BESI/

Commission to Build a Healthier America

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has posted 2 new entries about my healthy city planning work on their web sites:

http://www.commissiononhealth.org/Post.aspx?Blog=79764

and an article here:

http://www.rwjf.org/pr/product.jsp?id=52309

Let me know what you think!

Towards The Healthy City

Check out the new book from the MIT Press, http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11911