America’s Health Threat: Poor Urban Design

Richard Jackson waits for a bus outside Los Angeles International Airport. The UCLA scientist is a leading voice in the call for better urban design for the sake of public health. // David Zentz for The Chronicle

Researchers can have revelatory moments in remarkable places—the African savannah, an ancient library, or the ruins of a lost civilization. But Richard J. Jackson's epiphany occurred in 1999 in a banal American landscape: a dismal stretch of the car-choked Buford Highway, near the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

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