Designing Healthier Communities
We help create more livable, walkable, bikeable, and vibrant communities where people live longer and better with a higher quality of life.
What is the Built Environment?
The built environment includes all the human-made places and spaces where we live, play, and work. This includes: neighborhoods, homes, buildings, streets, bridges, sidewalks, parks.
Research shows the built environment impacts health and well-being — either positively or negatively.
What We Do
Blue Zones supports communities on process—civic participation and decision-making go hand-in-hand—to build a shared vision and blueprint toward a healthier, resilient, prosperous human habitat; we don’t just plan and design, we help communities get breakthrough model projects on the ground, engaging a diverse group of professionals, elected leaders and communities leaders to develop a game plan for first fixing the roads, then cultivating a more communal atmosphere surrounding each travel route, and ultimately adding to adjacent property values and overall economic growth.
Our Services
Walkability & Active Transportation
- Complete Streets
- Safe Routes to School
- Transportation Equity
- Street Connectivty
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Transformative Placemaking
- Main Streets
- Public Space Activation
- Urban Planning + Design
- Age-friendly Design
- Green Space Activation
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Education, Research & Policy
- Walking Audits
- Speeches and Presentations
- Housing Policies
- Land Use Planning
- Pop-Up Demonstration Sites
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Our Areas of Work
Dan Burden
Director of Innovation and Inspiration
Dan leads the company in reinventing streets, neighborhoods and towns with walkability and bikeability solutions. He is the nation’s most recognized authority on walkability, bicycle and pedestrian programs, street corridor and intersection design, traffic flow & calming, road diets, and other city planning elements. The White House recognized him as one of the top ten Champions of Change in Transportation, TIME magazine called him “one of the six most important civic innovators in the world,” and his peers at Planetizen list him as one of the 100 most significant urban thinkers of all time.
Danielle Schaeffner, MPH
Director of Planning and Projects
Danielle has represented health at the local, regional, state, and national level, leading and supporting a range of active transportation efforts, including work in comprehensive and mode-specific planning, Health Impact Assessment (HIA), Complete Streets and built environment policy guidance. She is the former Physical Activity Coordinator for the Hawaii State Department of Health and former Environmental Health Specialist for the Kitsap County Public Health District in Washington. She is passionate about working with partners across sectors to promote policy, systems and environmental changes that increase access to multimodal options for all ages, races, incomes, and abilities. Danielle holds an MPH in epidemiology from Emory University's Rollins School of Public Health.
Mark Fenton
Built Environment & Walkability Expert
Mark Fenton is a public health, land use, and transportation expert who combines a public health perspective with engineering expertise. He studied biomechanics at MIT, did research at the US Olympic Training Center’s Sports Science Laboratory in Colorado Springs, CO, and was a research engineer at Reebok’s Human Performance Laboratory for several years. He is the former host of the PBS series, America’s Walking, and is now an adjunct associate professor at Tufts University’s Friedman School of Nutrition Science & Policy.
Who We Are
The Blue Zones network of world-renowned experts is deep and wide, ensuring we can deploy industry's highest quality talent where and when it is needed.
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