Warning: living in a city could seriously damage your health | Flo... https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/13/warnin...

Warning: living in a city could seriously

damage your health
Florence Williams
More people than ever live in urban environments, where dirty air, noise and stress
must be tackled

Illustration by Jasper Rietman

Monday 13 March 2017 06.00GMT

I
recently spent some time walking around Washington DC, where I live, with an
aethalometer sticking out of my shirt collar. I carried the device, which measures air
pollution, around with me like a pet monkey as I walked in a city park, drove on the
citys circular beltway and picked up my kids from school. It was sadly eye-opening
because it conrmed what I have long suspected: my city is a polluted place.

The monitor, borrowed from Columbia Universitys Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory

in Palisades, New York, measures black carbon, a byproduct of car engines and other
fuel-burning processes. Its name comes from the Greek word meaning to blacken with
soot. And thats exactly what happened.

The spindly machine measured high readings of 6,000 nanograms per cubic meter while

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I drove around, even during o-peak hours. More shockingly, I recorded equally high
values just outside my daughters school, where cars and buses idle, waiting to pick up
students. Much of the pollution there is generated by diesel fuel, which has been shown
to shorten life spans around the world by causing cardiovascular and pulmonary
problems. Worldwide, ne particulate matter, of which black carbon is a component, is
blamed for 2.1 million premature deaths annually.

Scientists have long considered the lungs as vulnerable to air pollution. Only recently
have they come to realisethe role of the nose as a pathway to the brain; the extent of the
nose-brain connection was only illuminated in2003, when researchers in smog-choked
Mexico City found brain lesions on straydogs.

Unfortunately for city dwellers, the closer we live to these roads, the higher our risk of
autism, stroke and cognitive decline in ageing, although the exact reasons havent been
teased out. Scientists suspect it has something to do with ne particles causing tissue
inammation and altering gene expression in the brains immune cells.

I hold my breath when Im behind a diesel bus, Michelle Block, a neurobiologist who
studies pollutions eects on microglial cells at Virginia Commonwealth University, told
me.

Regardless of whether people know about pollution, its eects are being felt in other
ways too. In one 2008 survey of 400 Londoners by economists George MacKerron and
Susana Mourato at the London School of Economics, life satisfaction fell signicantly
half a point on an 11-point scale for each additional 10 micrograms per cubic metre of
nitrogen dioxide pollution, also a common byproduct of diesel engines.

Because I am strangely driven to probe the unhealthy aspects of my life, I also walked
around my city wearing a portable electroencephalogram (EEG) device on my head. I
wanted to know how easily I could attain alpha brain waves (indicating a calm,
focused state of mind) by walking in various parts of the city, including a park.

Research has shown that people wholive in cities may suer more psychological stress
than people who live in rural areas. For a study published in Nature in 2011, Jens
Pruessner and colleagues at the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim found a
21% increase in anxiety disorders, a 39% increase in mood disorders and a doubled risk
of schizophrenia in city dwellers. Urban living was linked to increased activity in the
brains amygdala the fear centre and in the perigenual anterior cingulate cortex, a key
region for regulating fear and stress.

Meanwhile, a 2011 study from Portugal found that people living near industrial grey
areas reported less optimism. This may sound trivial, but optimism is associated with
healthier behaviours (such as a willingness to exercise), lower levels of fat in the blood
and mental resilience, or the ability to recover from stress.

I uploaded the data from my EEG to a California-based website that read it, fed it into an
algorithm, and sent me back this dejected message about my lack of alphas: This
indicates that in this state you were actively processing information and, perhaps, that
you should relaxmore often!

Both my local park and my house sit under the ightpath of a busy airport, and noise

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pollution is yet another well-proven source of stress. I decided to measure the noise.
This I did in my very own backyard, using an iPhone app. I found out that the jets ying
overhead every two minutes cranked out average decibel levels between 55 and 60 but
sometimes spiking much higher (60 decibels is high enough to drown out normal
speech). These are the same levels linked to stress-related disease and increased use of
anti-anxiety medication in European studies. I bought noise-cancelling headphones.
And I thought seriously about moving to the Rocky Mountains.

But before we all ditch our cities to camp out in a hay bale, its worth remembering that
there are some excellent ways to counter the ill eects of crowded, Euclidean,
monochromatic, loud modern life. Because, lets face it, there are still some rather nice
things about living in cities. And the fact is, more and more of us live in them. Globally,
as of 2008, more people live in cities than outside them. By 2050, another two billion
people will pile in, leading one US anthropologist, Jason Vargo, to suggest a new name
for our species: Metro sapiens. Learning to make cities livable will be one of the greatest
public health challenges of this century.

One clear step is the need to tackle air pollution. Health experts in the UK recently
suggested parents cover their babies prams during morning rush hour. A better solution
would be to regulate the polluters. Paris, Madrid, Athens and Mexico City plan to ban
diesel vehicles from city centres within the next 10 years.

Another antidote to noise, particulates and greyness is both delightful and aordable:
trees. For humans, urban trees provide not just aesthetic pleasure but health benets.
Trees soak up air pollution, create cooling and provide a brain-tingling array of colours,
textures and scents. The birds they shelter provide us with birdsong, which in turn is
linked to feelings of wellbeing.

Consider the example of Toronto, Canada. The city values its 10m trees at C$7bn
(4.3bn). A 2015 study there showed the higher a neighbourhoods tree density, the
lower the incidence of heart and metabolic disease, and estimated that the health boost
to those living on blocks with 11 more trees than average was equivalent to a C$20,000
gain in median income.

I hope to become so lucky, since Washington DC and partner nonprots have been trying
to plant at least 8,600 trees per year in an eort to increase the street canopy to 40% in
the next two decades. New York City recently completed a campaign to plant a million
trees, and Los Angeles, Shanghai, Denver and Dubai are in the middle of similar projects.

I envision soon nestling under a sprawling oak and removing all of my monitoring
devices. It will just be me and the tree, and I wont need a machine to tell me I feel
better.

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Topics
Cities/Opinion
Health/comment

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