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To choose where one lives does not have anything insignificant. This choice has some consequences on our health, according to experts who debated ecohealth at the time of the recent convention of the French-speaking association for the knowledge (ACFAS), held to Quebec of May 2008 5 to 9.

The ecosystem is a new concept that integrates two poles: the ecology and health. For several experts, it conceive the city and the suburb according to the health of his / her / its inhabitants and the one of the environment. They put the emphasis on very bound besides two aspects of the ecosystem: the means of transportation and the place where one resides.

"The displacements increase more quickly than the population, underline entry of game Louis Drouin, physician specialist in public health and responsible sector of the urban environment and health to the agency of health and the social services of Montreal." There were besides about 40 000 vehicles per year in the metropolitan region on the last five years ", he / it adds, recalling the same breath that the use of the public transportation decreased from 7% of 1987 to 2003.

Of the direct effects on health

The growth of the road traffic accidents makes the increase of the road and the cardiopulmonary illnesses because of the pollution of air. The motorized transportation decrease the workforce mobility, with consequences on the obesity. They increase to greenhouse effect gases and the noise, "affirm Louis Drouin. Besides, the phenomenon of the heat islets. Of the urban sectors where the temperature is raised more than elsewhere during the summer - becomes more pronounced whereas the surface of the wooded surfaces decreased 18%, of 1998 to 2005, in the region of Montreal. And the wooded surfaces become the parking lots, roads and the centers of the purchases, he / it deplores.

Condemning the norm rarely put back in the issue of urban development centered on the car since the last 50 years, Louis Drouin asks for a moratorium on the Law on the planning and the urbanism. In order to decrease the number of vehicles on the road, he / it asks for the creation of public transportation "prompt, safe, accessible, rapids, with reserved ways like in Paris and in Strasbourg."

"It is the time of the redensify districts to localize the current destinations of walk from afar", affirm Louis Drouin. He / it suggests to benefit because it will be necessary to renew the aging infrastructure, to reconsider the city and the suburb.

The Woods-Straightforward district: of the disappointing results

The success of a dense district that encourages the active displacements (bicycle and walk) and the collective transportation is not so simple, return architect Carole Despres, Professor Laval to the university and co-founder of the Group of interdisciplinary research on the suburbs. The Woods-Straightforward district, in the precinct Montrealer Saint-Laurent, conceived according to these rules of the new urbanism, the famous well. His / her / its 6 000 inhabitants enjoy an easy access to a cycle track, to the subway, in the suburb of train and to the buses. A big park occupies 20% of the surface of the district whose density is of 33 lodgings by hectare.

Even though this district is recognized by the American Congress organism heart the New Urbanism, the results of a recent étude1 made by a researcher of the national institute of the scientific research (INRS) are not pink, concede Carole Després. "One would have liked to say that the resident of the Woods-Straightforward district work more and that they take the car less that those of the rest of the precinct, but it is the opposite." Worse again, they beat the average of use of the car of the resident of the metropolitan region for the displacements for the leisures and the education.

How to explain these results? The management of the time, she / it risks. "Maybe that one has a child who is registered in a sport-study program on a strand and that one has a sick parent of which one must take care, or that one has just changed use that is farther … has a panoply of reasons that makes that people now live not to the scale of the district, but to the scale of the metropolis. "The concepts of the new urbanism are, according to her" founded on a species of nostalgia district of once walked one where to go to the school. The behaviors of people, today, are more complex. "

It is not better in suburb

The transformation of the suburb is necessary for a better health, according to urbanist Gerard Beaudet, director of the institute of urbanism of the university of Montreal. "More of the half of the Americans today live in suburb, he / it returns. However, it is one of the societies among the developed countries that the most important problems of health present. Therefore, one sees well that the suburb was not this miracle solution in which everybody believed during a long time ". One looks not only for the solutions for the quality of life and the problems of mobility of people, but also for health, pursues Gerard Beaudet. "Several indicators show that, if to live in a poor district is not an advantage, to live in richer districts is not necessarily the ultimate solution", he / it sustains.

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