Reconnecting with Our Roots

This article suggests that contemporary efforts to reconnect urban planning and public health can benefit from a critical historical review of the two fields, particularly strategies based on removal and displacement of waste and people, scientific rationality, moral environmentalism, and increased specialization. The article offers a set of reconnection strategies that draw from this review, emphasizing alternative paradigms of precaution and prevention, institution building, and local knowledge. I offer examples of specific practices that embody these ideas, such as health impact assessment, food systems planning, and promoting networks of community health workers, that address both the physical and social determinants of health and might effectively reconnect planning and public health to meet the challenges facing twenty-first-century cities.