A substantial contribution to the field illustrating how public health and planning policies merged and supported each other after the Industrial Revolution, parted ways in the twentieth century, and have now remerged in tackling contemporary issues of health and the built environment. Carr draws on a myriad of sources, and the work represents sound and thorough scholarship.
Clare Cooper Marcus, University of California, Berkeley
I cannot imagine a more perfect post-pandemic book. Public health provides the legal foundations for the architecture, landscape architecture, and planning professions in the United States. As a result, it is essential to understand the role that public health has played in shaping our cities. In The Topography of Wellness, Sara Jensen Carr provides a tour-de-force review and analysis of the checkered history of the contributions that public health and disease have played in designing and planning the American landscape.
Frederick Steiner, University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design
Care for the public body and care for public space used to be much more connected. Sara Jensen Carr, author of the just-published book Topography of Wellness, traces the division between public health and other disciplines, including medicine and planning, to the professionalization of those fields in the early 20th century.
Bloomberg CityLab
Sarah Jensen Carr takes a deep dive into the history of these efforts, from garden cities to suburbs and walkable cities, and explains how, in many instances, designing for health has just made us sicker. It?s a timely read, and one that reveals how our culture conceives of illness and who is ultimately responsible for treating it.
Curbed / New York Magazine
This well-organized book progresses clearly and chronologically through the successive impacts of six epidemics on the urban landscape of the United States. Carr's expansive understanding of physical, cultural, and psychological topographies as they relate to health and disease is shared in a seamless, accessible narrative. Readers who engage with this text will emerge with a clear understanding of how the human response to the perceived and real threat of disease plays out in physical space, resulting in various socially stratifying and structuring dynamic systems.
CHOICE
Carr's excellent book will refamiliarize landscape architects with their field?s history of engaging public health and help them better understand their own attitudes toward healthy landscapes.
Journal of Landscape Architecture
The Topography of Wellness's narrative pinpoints urban landscapes as a central platform for thinking about the health and wellness of the nation's inhabitants, as well as the undeniable political and social stakes of such endeavors.
Landscape Architecture Magazine
