Value your health: head for the inner city, and swerve the ‘burbs | Deborah Orr

We love to walk, especially on demonstrations. All that protesting keeps us city dwellers fit and well when we venture out of our high-density housing

There’s something wonderful about research that puts a whoopee cushion on the seat of conventional wisdom. This week a study by the universities of Oxford and Hong Kong suggested that people in built-up urban areas are happier and healthier than people living the good life in the suburbs. Can this be true?

It seems absurd. Everyone knows, because we have been told so often that the inner cities teem with desperate, exhausted people who have nowhere else to go, surviving in crowds, stress, dirt and the endless, cacophonous demands of consumerism, eyes for ever downcast in fear that some witless bumpkin might misadvisedly hazard a breezy “good morning”.

We have been told so often that the inner cities teem with desperate, exhausted people

Are the woods dotted with reprobates because they’re empty? Or are they empty because they’re dotted with reprobates?

Continue reading... October 07, 2017 at 11:30AM