ABSTRACT
Urban planning and public health share a belief that humanity can be improved through public policy and preventative action. Both professions emerged at a time of increasing prosperity and wrenching social and economic change, and each evolved in response to successes and failures in shaping the built environment. The relationship between the two disciplines can be characterized as an elaborate dance, where first one partner and then the other has taken the lead in deciding how the two should collaborate. Sometimes public health has influenced planning and provided the framework for how planners should shape housing, neighborhoods, and cities. At other times, it was planning that directed the attention of public health and suggested new programs and ways of doing research.
