Bringing Public Health Into Urban Revitalization

A particularly valuable opportunity to improve public health arises when an urban area is being redesigned and rebuilt following some type of serious disruption, whether it is caused by a sudden physical event, such as a hurricane or earthquake, or steady economic and social decline that may have occurred over decades. On November 10, 2014, the Institute of Medicine's Roundtable on Environmental Health Sciences, Research, and Medicine held a workshop concerning the ways in which the urban environment, conceived broadly from factors such as air quality and walkability to factors such as access to fresh foods and social support systems, can affect health. Participants explored the various opportunities to reimagine the built environment in a city and to increase the role of health promotion and protection during the process of urban revitalization. Bringing Public Health into Urban Revitalization summarizes the presentations and discussions from this workshop.

As the rates of chronic diseases, like diabetes, asthma and obesity skyrocket, research is showing that the built environment – the way our cities and towns are developed – contributes to the epidemic rates of these diseases. It is unlikely that those who planned and developed these places envisioned these situations. Public health, community development planning, and other fields influencing the built environment have operated in isolation for much of recent history, with the result being places that public health advocates have labelled, ‘designed for disease’. The sad irony of this is that planning and public health arose together, in response to the need to create health standards, zoning and building codes to combat the infectious diseases that were prevalent in the industrializing cities of late nineteenth and early twentieth century America. In recent years, the dramatic rise in chronic disease rates in cities and towns has begun to bring public health and planning back together to promote development pattern and policies facilitating physical activity and neighbourly interactions as antidotes. In this book, a number of such community development efforts are highlighted, bringing attention to the need to coordinate planning, community development and health policy. This book was originally published as a special issue of Community Development.

This forward-looking resource recasts the concept of healthy cities as not only a safe, pleasant, and green built environment, but also one that creates and sustains health by addressing social, economic, and political conditions. It describes collaborations between city planning and public health creating a contemporary concept of urban governance—a democratically-informed process that embraces values like equity. Models, critiques, and global examples illustrate institutional change, community input, targeted assessment, and other means of addressing longstanding sources of urban health challenges. In these ambitious pages, healthy cities are rooted firmly in the worldwide movement toward balanced and sustainable urbanization, developed not to disguise or displace entrenched health and social problems, but to encourage and foster solutions. Included in the coverage: Towards healthy urban governance in the century of the city“/li> Healthy cities emerge: Toronto, Ottawa, Copenhagen The role of policy coalitions in understanding community participation in healthy cities projects Health impact assessment at the local level The logic of method for evaluating healthy cities Plus: extended reports on healthy cities and communities in North and Latin America, Africa, Europe, Asia, Oceania, and the Middle East Healthy Cities will interest and inspire community leaders, activists, politicians, and entrepreneurs working to improve health and well-being at the local level, as well as public health and urban development scholars and professionals.

Including papers presented at the 11th International Conference on Urban Regeneration and Sustainability held in Alicante, Spain, this book addresses the multidisciplinary aspects of urban planning; a result of the increasing size of cities, the amount of resources and services required and the complexity of modern society. Most of the earth’s population live in cities and the process of urbanisation continues generating problems originating from the drift of the population towards them. These problems can be resolved by cities becoming efficient habitats, saving resources in a way that improves the standard of living. The process faces a number of challenges related to reducing pollution, improving main transportation and infrastructure systems and these challenges can contribute to the development of social and economic imbalances and require the development of new solutions. Large cities are probably the most complex mechanisms to manage, nevertheless they represent a productive ground for architects, engineers, city planners, social and political scientists able to conceive new ideas and time them according to technological advances and human requirements. The papers in this book cover such topics as: Appropriate technologies for smart cities; Architectural issues; Case studies - sustainable practices; Cultural quarters and interventions; Disaster and emergency response; Eco-town planning; Environmental management; Landscape planning and design; Planning for resilience; Quality of life; Socio-economic and political considerations; Pedestrians behaviour in different situation of traffic, modelling and safety; Sustainable urban regeneration and public space; City and beach; Sustainability and the built environment; Sustainable energy and the city; The community and the city; Transportation; Urban conservation and regeneration; Urban development and management; Urban infrastructure; Urban metabolism; Urban planning and design; Urban safety and security; Urban strategies; Waterfront development.

This volume brings together the world’s leading experts on urban and transport planning, environmental exposures, physical activity, health and health impact assessment to discuss challenges and solutions in cities. The book provides a conceptual framework and work program for actions and outlines future research needs. It presents the current evidence-base, the benefits of and numerous case studies on integrating health and the environment into urban development and transport planning. Within cities there is a considerable variation in the levels of environmental exposures such as ambient air pollution, noise, and temperature, green space availability and physical activity. Many of these exposures, and their adverse health impacts, are related to and are being exacerbated by urban and transport planning and policy. Emerging research suggests that urban and transport planning indicators such as road network, distance to major roads, traffic density, household density, industry, and natural and green space can explain a large proportion of the variability in environmental exposures and therefore represent important and highly modifiable factors. The urban environment is a complex interlinked system. Decision-makers need not only better data on the complexity of factors in environmental and developmental processes affecting human health, but also an enhanced understanding of the linkages between these factors and health effects to determine at which level to target their actions most effectively. In recent years, there also has been a shift from trying to change at the national level to more comprehensive and ambitious actions being developed and implemented at the regional and local levels. Cities have come to the forefront of providing solutions for environmental issues such as climate change, which has co-benefits for health, but yet need better knowledge for wider health-centric action. This book provides the latest and most up-to-date information and studies for academics and practitioners alike.

This historical study looks at how reformers have used urban planning and architecture to improve the health of urban residents of the United States. It begins in the nineteenth century, when problems in rapidly urbanizing cities threatened to overwhelm cities, and then traces the development and impact of reform movements up through the First World War, including discussions of model tenements, the 'city beautiful' movement, tenement laws, and zoning and building codes. Midcentury design movements, such as new efforts to plan suburbs and Modernism, along with outlines of the impacts of public housing, highway building, and urban renewal, are the focus of the middle chapters of the book. The final third examines the revival of cities and the reconnection of public health with urban planning that occurred as the twentieth century ended.

The editors are two of the most prominent researchers in this area. Both are at the Center for Urban Epidemiologic Studies. David Vlahov is particularly visible and known as the editor of the Journal of Urban Health. Sandro Galea is very prominent for his research on urban health; in particularly, research done on PTSD and children post-9/11. Thorough analysis of different populations in urban settings and specific health considerations Useful section on methods for the research audience. Applied in nature with section on prevention and interventions There are over 100 urban health centers in North America and there are no thorough, up-to-date ressources.

In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.