The crowd settles in Tuesday, Jan. 17, to watch “Episode 2: Rebuilding Places of the Heart,” which focuses on Elgin, in the four-part PBS documentary “Designing Healthy Communities.” (Ted Schnell • BocaJump) By Ted Schnell • BocaJump | Jan. 18, 2012
Reshaping Elgin into a “sustainable community” has become a hot-button phrase in recent years, as city leaders have sought to re-establish a once-broken city as a vibrant, growing healthy community.
Those efforts apparently are gaining recognition: Elgin was the centerpiece of the hour-long Midwest premier of the four-part PBS series, Designing Healthy Communities. The showing at Gail Borden Public Library on Tuesday evening was Episode 2: Rebuilding Places of the Heart, whose first half focuses on Elgin and a group of Elgin High School students in teacher Deb Perryman’s environmental sciences class.
Mayor David Kaptain, who was among those featured in the video, applauded the series and noted it is evidence that Elgin’s efforts not only are headed in the right direction, they are being recognized in that light.
“I saw it a couple of weeks ago, and it really moves Elgin into the national scene and kind of puts it on a level with some of the major communities,” Kaptain said. “Some of the things we are doing here are things we are doing at a national level. I think our vision and the vision we are moving forward are … exactly the kinds of things we should be doing.”
Harry Wiland, one of the series’ producers and co-founder of the Media Policy Center in Santa Monica, Calif., flew in for the Midwest premier in Elgin and moderated a short discussion afterward. Wiland said that the Media Policy Center, which he co-founded with Dale Bell, follows the motto of “leveraging media for social good.”
Wiland said the Media Policy Center spent a year researching and networking the before any film was even shot. It was during those investigations that the city of Elgin and its efforts toward sustainability arose.
“Elgin is really a microcosm of change,” he said. “Elgin faces many issues … zoning, education, safety all fall into the category of where change can happen.
“Another aspect of this project,” he continued, “is what do we owe the next generation of leaders? Of our children? We are looking to redesign and retrofit our communities to deal with these issues.”
But sustainability means different things to different people. For some, it may be environmental, for others, economic, for some, it may be health-related. Still for others, it is a mix of the various issues.
“For our city, there are a whole lot of threads that come out of this,” Kaptain said, “our public health and how to keep our citizens healthy … how we create a healthy environment for people by providing pedestrian ways and things like that.
“I don’t think the benefits of that stuff will be seen for many, many years,” he continued. “But the kids that are here — Deb Perryman’s class — they get it. They see it. … All of these kids who went through this want to come back and be a part of a growing city, and I think that’s the key.”
Wiland said the series focuses on many issues related to sustainability, keying in on the nation’s “built environment” — or cities and communities — and their impact on a variety of health issues, from obesity and diabetes to asthma, among others.
Dr. Richard Jackson narrates the series. He describes the rising incidences of asthma and obesity in the United States as pandemic and labels it “generational child abuse — the world is not being developed in a way that provides healthy living … (it is) poor design with toxic effects.”
The series intends not only to highlight the issues associated with our nation’s built environment, but also to offer solutions — “best practices” for making changes to our environment that will be healthier, more sustainable in all ways.
What is a sustainable community?
“It’s a community that can go on and on for future generations,” Kaptain said. “Elgin in the ’50s and the ’60s was the definition of an unsustainable community.”
As the series’ second episode points out, that is because Elgin grew up as a community centered on one industry — everything worked precisely in sync, like the finely machined pieces of an Elgin watch. Elgin’s existence as a city revolved largely around the Elgin National Watch Company, whose demise with the advent of the Timex wristwatch after World War II broke the city’s economic back.
“We relied on one industry, all our businesses were tied in economically to one thing,” Kaptain said. “When the watch factory failed, the community failed — all those things collapsed around it.”
Elgin’s decline came in an era when the automobile became increasingly prominent, and communities grew up with little regard for public transportation, parks, sidewalks, bike paths and other amenities related to health and well-being. The advent of the automobile and the absence of such healthy amenities gave rise to the nation’s obesity epidemic, which is linked with diabetes, according to the documentary. The increased air pollution created a spike in in the number of asthma cases.
In Elgin, “it all happened at once, and I think from that, we learned a lesson faster than a lot of other communities,” Kaptain said. That lesson provided the spark for the idea of a sustainable city.
The vision for a sustainable Elgin is broad. Economically, Kaptain said, the city cannot afford ever again to become so entirely reliant on one industry.
“I think the community buys into that,” Kaptain said. “A lot of people want to go back to 1955, see downtown like that — that’s not going to happen again. These kids are not going to allow that to happen. They see the difference, they see the things that are going to be important to them.”
Related:
Story: When will series air locally?
About the PBS series: Designing Healthy Communities
Episode focused on Elgin: Episode 2: Rebuilding Places of the Heart
About: Media Policy Center in Santa Monica, Calif.
