Ensuring Environmental Health in Post-Industrial Cities

March 19, 2003

David Lawrence Convention Center

Pittsburgh, PA

Individuals and communities today face many health problems that can be associated with our environment, including waste, unhealthy buildings, suburban sprawl, air pollution, water pollution, and environmentally related stress. In 1998, the Institute of Medicine created the Roundtable on Environmental Health Sciences, Research, and Medicine as a venue for interested parties from the academic, industrial, consumer, and federal research perspectives to meet and discuss sensitive and difficult issues of mutual interest in a neutral setting. The purpose is to foster discussion among people in different sectors and institutions that will illuminate issues, not resolve them.

At our first workshop, Rebuilding the Unity of Health and the Environment: A New Vision for the 21st Century, the participants and Roundtable members explored the need for a broader perspective of environmental health—one that incorporates the natural, the built, and the social environments. This workshop discussed many of the challenges that members of the environmental health community are facing and strength the need for engaging nontraditional partnerships in addressing these issues.

As a follow-up to this workshop, the Roundtable has begun to sponsor regional workshops to understand the complex issues in various regions in the United States. Pittsburgh is an ideal location to a workshop because it exemplifies the challenges facing post-industrial cities. During the industrial period, Pittsburgh was a city of rapid growth that created numerous economic opportunities for the people in the region, but also created health problems. In present day, Pittsburgh has come to terms with its industrial past and has been able to emerge as a model for post-industrial cities. They have been able to begin to address air and water quality issues, but it is clear that while they are a model, the city has further work to do.

This workshop is an opportunity for interested parties to discuss these local concerns in the broader environmental health context, and to help create partnerships to address these concerns as they currently exist and will likely emerge in the coming years. This meeting seeks to stimulate dialog about these issues among local business leaders, architects, urban planners, engineers, public health scientists, environmental scientists, health care providers, social scientists, clergy, educators, and the general public.

This event is free and open to all interested parties, but we kindly ask that all participants pre-register.