Building Healthy Places Toolkit

"This project was made possible through the generous financial support of the Colorado Health Foundation. Additional support for the ULI Building Healthy Places Initiative has been provided by the estate of Melvin Simon."

Distilling lessons learned from three health-focused Urban Land Institute advisory services panels in Colorado, as well as other findings on public health gleaned from a workshop with leading experts, this publication includes up-to-the-minute thinking on how to design and build healthy communities. It serves as a tool for public officials, development professionals, and others to help lay out the key elements that make a community more conducive to activity and that encourage better eating and healthier living.

The built environment influences health and well-being in a myriad of ways. Some neighbourhoods are plagued by busy roads that are a constant source of danger, noise, and air pollution. In some cities there is inadequate green space for children to play and socialise safely. Yet, this book argues, it does not have to be this way. With focus on human health, well-being, and flourishing, this book explores the ways in which people’s lives are impacted by the built environment and how we can create, adapt, and design healthy and inclusive places. The volume explores the relationship between urban design and human flourishing and initiates broad discussions around relevant questions such as ‘What is a healthy place?’, ‘What influences our perceptions of built environment more? Is it our age or our cultural background?’. The book includes six chapters from internationally renowned authors who attempt to unpack some of the key aspects that urban designers need to consider in order to create places that enable – rather than constrain – individuals and communities to live rich fulfilling lives. This book will be of great value to students, scholars, and researchers interested in urban design, planning, and in exploring how built environment impacts health and happiness. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Urban Design.

Good housing. Easy transit. Food access. Green spaces. Gathering places. Everybody wants to live in a healthy neighborhood. Bridging the gap between research and practice, it maps out ways for cities and towns to help their residents thrive in placed designed for living well, approaching health from every side – physical mental, and social.

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.

The COVID-19 pandemic has reignited discussions of how architects, landscape designers, and urban planners can shape the environment in response to disease. This challenge is both a timely topic and one with an illuminating history. In The Topography of Wellness, Sara Jensen Carr offers a chronological narrative of how six epidemics transformed the American urban landscape, reflecting changing views of the power of design, pathology of disease, and the epidemiology of the environment. From the infectious diseases of cholera and tuberculosis, to so-called social diseases of idleness and crime, to the more complicated origins of today’s chronic diseases, each illness and its associated combat strategies has left its mark on our surroundings. While each solution succeeded in eliminating the disease on some level, sweeping environmental changes often came with significant social and physical consequences. Even more unexpectedly, some adaptations inadvertently incubated future epidemics. From the Industrial Revolution to present day, this book illuminates the constant evolution of our relationship to wellness and the environment by documenting the shifting grounds of illness and the urban landscape. Preparation of this volume has been supported by Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund

Updated framework for health promotion practice including distinction between comprehensive and selective primary health care approaches, and the addition of the health promotion practice cycle Introduction to the values and principles of critical health promotion and their application within a comprehensive primary health care context Increased focus on indigenous perspectives, with current Australian and New Zealand examples Quizzes to check understanding of the content of each chapter