Urban Health and Planning in the 21st Century: Bridging Across the Formal and Informal Using an Eco-Social Lens

Urban Health and Planning in the 21st Century: Bridging Across the Formal and Informal Using an Eco-Social Lens PDF

Author: Ritu Priya

Publisher: Frontiers Media SA

Published: 2024-03-22

Total Pages: 136

ISBN-13: 283254665X

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Modern urban planning emerged in response to public health challenges in the post-industrial revolution period in Europe. It has since evolved through the colonial and post-colonial phases of the 19th and 20th centuries with international, national, and local specificities. In the 21st century, human societies are rapidly urbanizing, even in LMICs where half or more of the population still live in rural areas. Therefore public policies that shape the nature of urbanization and urban habitats will become ever more critical to human and planetary health and wellbeing.

The City is an Ecosystem

The City is an Ecosystem PDF

Author: Deborah Mutnick

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-08-09

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 1000622967

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The City is an Ecosystem maps an interdisciplinary, community-engaged response to the great ecological crises of our time—climate change, biodiversity loss, and social inequality—which pose particular challenges for cities, where more than half the world’s population currently live. Across more than twenty chapters, the three parts of the book cover historical and scientific perspectives on the city as an ecosystem; human rights to the city in relation to urban sustainability; and the city as a sustainability classroom at all educational levels inside and outside formal classroom spaces. It argues that such efforts must be interdisciplinary and widespread to ensure an informed public and educated new generation are equipped to face an uncertain future, particularly relevant in the post-COVID-19 world. Gathering multiple interdisciplinary and community-engaged perspectives on these environmental crises, with contemporary and historical case study discussions, this timely volume cuts across the humanities and social and health sciences, and will be of interest to policymakers, urban ecologists, activists, built environment professionals, educators, and advanced students concerned with the future of our cities.

Toward the Healthy City

Toward the Healthy City PDF

Author: Jason Corburn

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2009-09-04

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 0262258099

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A call to reconnect the fields of urban planning and public health that offers a new decision-making framework for healthy city planning. In distressed urban neighborhoods where residential segregation concentrates poverty, liquor stores outnumber supermarkets, toxic sites are next to playgrounds, and more money is spent on prisons than schools, residents also suffer disproportionately from disease and premature death. Recognizing that city environments and the planning processes that shape them are powerful determinants of population health, urban planners today are beginning to take on the added challenge of revitalizing neglected urban neighborhoods in ways that improve health and promote greater equity. In Toward the Healthy City, Jason Corburn argues that city planning must return to its roots in public health and social justice. The first book to provide a detailed account of how city planning and public health practices can reconnect to address health disparities, Toward the Healthy City offers a new decision-making framework called “healthy city planning” that reframes traditional planning and development issues and offers a new scientific evidence base for participatory action, coalition building, and ongoing monitoring. To show healthy city planning in action, Corburn examines collaborations between government agencies and community coalitions in the San Francisco Bay area, including efforts to link environmental justice, residents' chronic illnesses, housing and real estate development projects, and planning processes with public health. Initiatives like these, Corburn points out, go well beyond recent attempts by urban planners to promote public health by changing the design of cities to encourage physical activity. Corburn argues for a broader conception of healthy urban governance that addresses the root causes of health inequities.

Urban Health, Sustainability, and Peace in the Day the World Stopped

Urban Health, Sustainability, and Peace in the Day the World Stopped PDF

Author: Ali Cheshmehzangi

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-08-30

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 9811648883

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This book covers the nexus between urban health, sustainability, and peace. 'Urban Health, Sustainability, and Peace' is the first book that attempts to put these three critical areas together. This novelty approaches the subject matter by delving into evaluating what works, what does not work, and what should be done to achieve healthy cities. We believe this book will be beneficial to a wide range of stakeholders, particularly policymakers, planners, and developers, who continuously shape and reshape the structure and environments of our cities and communities. Unfortunately, in most cases, the healthiness of the cities may not be of their immediate concern. Nevertheless, it is the concern of the end-users, citizens, or simply those who live and work in cities and communities worldwide. To safeguard peace in cities, one has to consider sustaining urban health; and that is the main aim of this book. The ongoing pandemic gives us an excellent reason to study cities' health. During such a disruptive time, we detect many flaws in cities and communities around the world. We primarily identify the negative impacts on sustainability and peace in cities. In order to sustain a healthy city, this book evaluates six sustainability dimensions of physical, environmental, economic, social, institutional, and technical. It then utilizes eight primary dimensions of positive peace, evaluating critical areas for future considerations in urbanism. These considerations include making cities smarter, more resilient, and more sustainable. The book's ultimate goal is to highlight how we should progress to maintain and sustain urban health. As a continuation to 'The City in Need,', this book covers the nexus between urban health, sustainability, and peace. Furthermore, by reflecting on the ongoing pandemic crisis, metaphorically labelled as 'The Day the World Stopped,', we delve into some key areas beyond the usual planning and policy guidelines. Lastly, the book intends to highlight what has not been studied before, i.e., the relationship between urban health, sustainability, and peace.

Healthy City Planning

Healthy City Planning PDF

Author: Jason Corburn

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-04-12

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 1135038422

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Healthy city planning means seeking ways to eliminate the deep and persistent inequities that plague cities. Yet, as Jason Corburn argues in this book, neither city planning nor public health is currently organized to ensure that today’s cities will be equitable and healthy. Having made the case for what he calls ‘adaptive urban health justice’ in the opening chapter, Corburn briefly reviews the key events, actors, ideologies, institutions and policies that shaped and reshaped the urban public health and planning from the nineteenth century to the present day. He uses two frames to organize this historical review: the view of the city as a field site and as a laboratory. In the second part of the book Corburn uses in-depth case studies of health and planning activities in Rio de Janeiro, Nairobi, and Richmond, California to explore the institutions, policies and practices that constitute healthy city planning. These case studies personify some of the characteristics of his ideal of adaptive urban health justice. Each begins with an historical review of the place, its policies and social movements around urban development and public health, and each is an example of the urban poor participating in, shaping, and being impacted by healthy city planning.

Urban Health

Urban Health PDF

Author: H. Patricia Hynes

Publisher: Jones & Bartlett Learning

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 0763752452

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"New responses to the urban environment have arisen in the late 20th and early 21st centuries; responses that provide grounded and cohesive insights and plans of action to confront social inequality, health disparity, and environmental injustice in U.S. cities." "Urban Health is a collection of 13 articles that document action from these incisive and dimensioned responses. The authors introduce each set of articles with their own insightful analysis. These critical writings on the social, built, and physical environments offer a paradigm of environment protection that is rooted in civil rights for social and racial equality and that considers the environment as the place where people live, work, play, and pray."--Jacket.

Handbook of Global Urban Health

Handbook of Global Urban Health PDF

Author: Igor Vojnovic

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-05-09

Total Pages: 826

ISBN-13: 1315465442

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Through interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary perspectives, and with an emphasis on exploring patterns as well as distinct and unique conditions across the globe, this collection examines advanced and cutting-edge theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of the health of urban populations. Despite the growing interest in global urban health, there are limited resources available that provide an extensive and advanced exploration into the health of urban populations in a transnational context. This volume offers a high-quality and comprehensive examination of global urban health issues by leading urban health scholars from around the world. The book brings together a multi-disciplinary perspective on urban health, with chapter contributions emphasizing disciplines in the social sciences, construction sciences and medical sciences. The co-editors of the collection come from a number of different disciplinary backgrounds that have been at the forefront of urban health research, including public health, epidemiology, geography, city planning and urban design. The book is intended to be a reference in global urban health for research libraries and faculty collections. It will also be appropriate as a text for university class adoption in upper-division under-graduate courses and above. The proposed volume is extensive and offers enough breadth and depth to enable it to be used for courses emphasizing a U.S., or wider Western perspective, as well as courses on urban health emphasizing a global context.

Bridging Silos

Bridging Silos PDF

Author: Katrina Smith Korfmacher

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2019-08-27

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 0262537567

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How communities can collaborate across systems and sectors to address environmental health disparities; with case studies from Rochester, New York; Duluth, Minnesota; and Southern California. Low-income and marginalized urban communities often suffer disproportionate exposure to environmental hazards, leaving residents vulnerable to associated health problems. Community groups, academics, environmental justice advocates, government agencies, and others have worked to address these issues, building coalitions at the local level to change the policies and systems that create environmental health inequities. In Bridging Silos, Katrina Smith Korfmacher examines ways that communities can collaborate across systems and sectors to address environmental health disparities, with in-depth studies of three efforts to address long-standing environmental health issues: childhood lead poisoning in Rochester, New York; unhealthy built environments in Duluth, Minnesota; and pollution related to commercial ports and international trade in Southern California. All three efforts were locally initiated, driven by local stakeholders, and each addressed issues long known to the community by reframing an old problem in a new way. These local efforts leveraged resources to impact community change by focusing on inequities in environmental health, bringing diverse kinds of knowledge to bear, and forging new connections among existing community, academic, and government groups. Korfmacher explains how the once integrated environmental and public health management systems had become separated into self-contained “silos,” and compares current efforts to bridge these separations to the development of ecosystem management in the 1990s. Community groups, government agencies, academic institutions, and private institutions each have a role to play, but collaborating effectively requires stakeholders to appreciate their partners' diverse incentives, capacities, and constraints.

Measuring and Mapping the Relationships Between Urban Environment and Urban Health

Measuring and Mapping the Relationships Between Urban Environment and Urban Health PDF

Author: Jocelyn Pak Drummond

Publisher:

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 122

ISBN-13:

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The fields of urban planning and public health both emerged in the 19th century and were united in an effort to address poor health conditions that were linked to the urban environment of cities. By the end of the 20th century, planning and public health had drifted apart to a point where they were completely disparate in mission and action. Over the last two decades, public health professionals, planners, and urban designers have begun to reconsider the connections that once united them. !ere is much that is still unproven about the relationships between the physical, natural, and social environments of cities and urban health, but national and local governments and research groups have designed ways to measure the urban environment and its effect on health. New York City is a leader in interagency collaboration and citywide initiatives to address urban health issues through planning policy and urban design, specifically the Active Design Guidelines. At the same time, the obesity epidemic is on the rise in most New York City neighborhoods and the disparities among them are great. This thesis will explore mapping as a tool for better understanding the spatial relationships between urban environment and urban health and informing policy and design decisions about the implementation of active design in New York. While it is currently understood that the social environment has the largest impact on urban health, the results of this thesis suggest that the physical and natural environments are also important contributors to obesity in New York City. This thesis provides recommendations for intervention in all three aspects of the urban environment in New York as a model of healthful planning and urban design. The goal of this research is to aid in the reconnection of urban planning and health in order to address the health epidemics and disparities of the 21st century.

RECONNECTING PUBLIC HEALTH AND URBAN PLANNING

RECONNECTING PUBLIC HEALTH AND URBAN PLANNING PDF

Author: Marlon Maus

Publisher:

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 375

ISBN-13:

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The most pressing health problems of the 21st century - such as obesity, diabetes, osteoporosis, cancer, depression, and cardiovascular disease - cannot be addressed using traditional public health interventions. Population growth and climate warming are global challenges that threaten not just the health but perhaps the very survival of human beings. These, too, require innovative, "outside-the-box" solutions. At the root of these problems, and their solutions, lies the intimate relationship between where we live (our built environment) and how we live (our behavior). The separation of the disciplines has also been blamed, at least in part, for the failure to recognize the links between the built environment and the health disparities found among communities of color and of low socio-economic status. Correctly designed communities can improve their residents' health by encouraging physical activity, providing access to healthy food, and strengthening social networks and capital, while also decreasing waste and pollution, shortening commute times and the resulting stress, and addressing issues of social inequity. A century ago, the relationships and dependencies between land use planning and public health were well understood - then, through the 20th century, the two disciplines evolved independently, and each lost its appreciation for the value of collaboration with the other. Before we can bring together the concerns of the built environment and public health, we must first reconnect the disciplines of land use planning and public health and reestablish the mutually beneficial relationship they once enjoyed. This study explores the current state of collaboration between public health and land use planning agencies in California, in order to identify contextual factors that can act as either incentives or barriers for collaboration. The study consists of 18 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with land use planners and public health professionals that explored the relationship between the disciplines. By using Grounded Theory Methods and Social Exchange Theory, a Five Stage Model for Collaboration has been elaborated and the central theoretical construct of Cost-Benefit Analysis has been identified. A Cost-Benefit Audit tool (the Collaboration Manual for Public Health and Planning) based on the study results has been developed; a social ecologic model approach was used, and it suggests ways to improve and promote collaboration between public health and land use planning. The study proposes that a transdisciplinary approach to collaboration may be the most appropriate means to address the complex health problems that result from, and can be influenced by, the interaction of the built environment and the individual.