Creating Healthy Neighborhoods: Reflecting on Places, Processes, and Prospects

Objective What does it really take to create a healthy place? What are the potentials and limits of evidence-based practice?

Methods Reflecting on the experience of many years of writing about healthy places, I consider the potential for evidence-based practice.

Results Neighborhoods can protect from harmful exposures, help people connect to the resources they need to live a healthy life, and support health promoting behaviors.

Conclusion Creating healthy places involves more than developing environments with features thought to be health promoting, however, but rather also engaging the process of making, maintaining, and using such places. Most challenging for this kind of comprehensive approach is the need to create ongoing collaborations.