People in France seem pretty healthy. Angers is not an incredibly urban city compared to a place like Paris, but it is more developed than a countryside village like Bas Village that I visited with my host family one weekend. Living in urban areas can have both positive and negative effects on your life. For one, urban areas tend to have a lot more cars and waste than rural places do. Although Angers has a bus system and tram, most families I have met have at least one car. With a population of 148,803 people as of 2011 (http://www.angers.fr/index.php?id=51145), add up every family in Angers and that’s a lot of car exhaust. The family’s house in Bas Village sat on the Maine River so they didn’t even have a car. They actually just had a hollow wooden boat that they would take down the river into town if they needed.
Bas Village cottage
Maine River
On the flip side, the bigger cities like Paris and Angers have the option to rent bikes in town unlike small country towns. So while each family typically has a car, they do not necessarily use them all the time. My host family uses their car maybe once a week, and that is usually only if it it raining. Each morning, my host mom straps her three year old son into his seat on the back on her bike and pedals him up the street to school using the bike lanes that the city provides. People in France seem to pay a lot more attention to cyclists than people in the states. In both Austin and Chicago I can remember multiple specific times where my effort to get out on my bike and utilize the ever-so-convenient bike lanes almost got me killed, but here I have only had that issue once or twice. Moral of this story, cars still rule the roads no matter where your bike lanes are drawn on the globe.
Bike lane in Angers
An interesting thing I have noticed about bike rentals here is that unlike in Chicago and Austin, most of the people using the rentals are locals. In all of Chicago, only 1.6% of commuters use bikes (http://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20130927/downtown/bike-commuting-chicago-rises-census-says). The percentage of people biking in Austin was recorded as 7% (http://www.austin360.com/news/lifestyles/recreation/austin-fosters-growing-cycling-community-with-in-1/nRZRM/). People back home don’t seem to want to go out of their way to ride a bike to work as much as they would rather just get in their cars and getting to work immediately, as long as there isn’t insane amounts of traffic. Traffic is another issue that comes from urbanization. Angers doesn’t seem to have very much traffic compared to Austin, Chicago, or Paris. Large populations are the main cause of this, but if these cities were not so heavily reliant on cars, this obviously would not be as much of a problem. The massive amounts of traffic in these places make it harder for people to easily bike or walk without putting themselves in danger. I remember watching the cars zoom around the Arc de Triomph in Paris with seemingly no road rules and I was just waiting for someone to slam into someone else but amazingly enough that didn’t happen…
There weren’t even specific lanes! Ahhhh
Food Resources
Urbanization has different effects on the foods we eat as well. The fast paced life of big cities doesn’t exactly allow much time for personal gardening. While rural towns build up their local gardens, big cities build up the next apartment complex. However, the French lifestyle is a lot slower than those in Chicago and Austin. Urbanization doesn’t seem to have an effect on how my host family views food. Every night consists of only fresh foods from the garden, but that is not the case for all families here of course. They make a huge effort to eat only organic, homegrown foods, but this requires them to go out to their parents’ farms outside of the city. Urbanization typically results in living really close to each other in smaller homes which doesn’t allow much room for gardening. It does, however, allow a lot of room for Kabob restaurants. The point here is that rural lifestyles have more of an option to eat clean, fresh foods than urban cities.
The family in Bas Village grew everything they ate in their backyard. Even the chickens… The man even handmade his own bread! Their life was so calm and healthy.
No preservatives means eating grass straight from the ground…
Home grown apples used for dessert
Urbanization and Stress
Urbanization also seems to make people more high strung. Its a lot more stressful to worry about traffic, what to eat, getting from point A to point B safely and quickly, etc. than it is to just walk outside, pick up dinner out of the ground, and then take your boat down the secluded river to your friend’s house for a nice evening. Obviously that lifestyle isn’t an option for everyone and that isn’t the only way to relieve stress from your life, but even adding a little bit of nature and serenity can calm you down and eliminate some stress. I think people often don’t consider stress to be as big of a problem as it really is. It seems to be something that people blow off and think squeezing a stress ball will fix, but it can really do some damage to the body. People deal with it differently. It is important to consider where stress comes from because “for humans…stress most often derives from social circumstances” (Wiley and Allen 307). I’ve been feeling stressed lately with the pressure of managing a new place, a new language, living with a family I don’t know/don’t feel completely comfortable with, fitting in time to hang out with the group, balancing school and life, and seeing the world all at the same time while being slapped in the face with some major homesickness. Modern humans are full of stress from things like “commuting, the threat of losing one’s job, getting into college, saving for retirement” (Lieberman location 2173) so it is really important to have outlets. Nature is my outlet so spending time outside at least once a week (usually more) calms me down a lot. I went on a long bike ride by myself and sat on the river in a secluded little area watching the insects skim the water for about an hour and I felt more relaxed than I had in a good two weeks. The good part about living around such a beautiful place surrounded by trails and trees is that people do have this option to escape reality for a little bit if they so desire.
http://www.austin360.com/news/lifestyles/recreation/austin-fosters-growing-cycling-community-with-in-1/nRZRM/
http://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20130927/downtown/bike-commuting-chicago-rises-census-says
http://www.angers.fr/index.php?id=51145
Lieberman, Daniel. The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease. Pantheon, 2013. Print.
Wiley, Andrea S., and John S. Allen. Medical Anthropology: A Biocultural Approach. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford UP, 2013. Print.