What is healthy urban planning?
Healthy Urban Planning arose from The World Health Organisation (WHO) Healthy Cities Project, a long-term international development initiative aiming to place health high on the agenda of decision-makers in Europe. Urban planning can have a major impact on conditions in cities. The conditions in which people live and work, their access to facilities and services, their lifestyles and their ability to develop strong social networks are all influenced by the plans, policies and initiatives of urban planners and related professions. At the same time these are key determinants of the health, wellbeing and quality of life of people of cities.
In many ways, concerns about health are where modern planning began. Issues such as overcrowding, lack of sanitation, contaminated drinking water and air pollution led to serious public health issues. This is exactly what the planning system was designed to tackle, with land use zoning to separate people from polluting industries, and sanitary standards to tackle communicable disease. And it did this extremely successfully. Since then, spatial planning and public health have diverged, with each profession seemingly unaware of the current links between the two. Nevertheless, current public health issues such as obesity, chronic heart disease, stress, mental health and well-being are intricately linked to the environments in which people live and work.
Despite significant improvements in the health of Glasgow, major health challenges for the city remain. These challenges include dealing with premature death, poor physical and mental health and health inequalities. Many of these issues are exacerbated by environmental conditions. Thus, improving health depends on a number of related factors including employment, housing, transport, local crime and safety problems, education, levels of poverty and accessibility to healthcare services. If successful planning is about building a better future an intrinsic aim must be to improve the health of the population.