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2018 | Buch

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Urban Planning for Healthy European Cities

verfasst von: Dr. Rosalba D'Onofrio, Prof. Elio Trusiani

Verlag: Springer International Publishing

Buchreihe : SpringerBriefs in Geography

Enthalten in: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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Über dieses Buch

This book investigates different aspects of the relationship between “healthy cities” and “urban planning”, examining various best practices in Europe. It uses the above as a starting point and investigates different aspects of healthy cities, examining various best practices in Europe. Capitalizing on ongoing trials, the chapters identify the policies that underlie plans and projects that have caused positive changes in local communities in terms of the quality of life and safety of inhabitants. From these best practices, the book deduces criteria and guidelines for planning healthy and safe cities.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

The City for Better Living

Frontmatter

Chapter 1. For the “Human” Development of Cities in an Era of Climate Change

Abstract

The connection between health, well-being, and the quality of living spaces is not accidental. The organization of the city and, in general, of social and environmental contexts, is capable of conditioning and modifying emerging needs, lifestyles, and individual expectations. Faced with scientific evidence for these relationships, it is necessary for urban planning to realize that there is no time left to hope that economic growth and demographic change, by themselves, will be able to generate conditions conducive to people’s quality of life. This invitation is energetically shared by the WHO’s Healthy Cities Movement. Through an interdisciplinary group that met between 2009 and 2011, the UCL–Lancet Commission developed a series of recommendations for policy makers to improve the urban environment and to open a discussion on the role that urban planning can play.

Rosalba D’Onofrio, Elio Trusiani

Chapter 2. Goals, Opportunities and Limits to the European Healthy Cities Network

Abstract

The history of European cities reflects the close, complex ties that unite urban planning and human health. An effective remedy against epidemics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, city planning has, paradoxically, contributed to the appearance of many problems related to the health and well-being of people in the modern era. In September 2012, the European Member States of the WHO adopted “Health 2020”, a strategic policy framework for the twenty-first century. Health 2020 explicitly recognizes the influence of the urban environment on health and the role of healthy cities and national networks in carrying forward the objectives and themes of this European strategy. Health 2020 also recognizes the emblematic role of the leadership of local governments in the development of health. Urban planning should address this activism in European cities and the need to overcome what can be defined as the risk of “projectism”, the risk of a short-term vision relying on isolated interventions rather than long-term programs or policies that can profoundly modify the organization of contemporary urban models in favor of the health and well-being of city inhabitants.

Rosalba D’Onofrio, Elio Trusiani

Chapter 3. Criteria of Healthfulness in Urban Environments: From a Theoretical Debate to Some Early Experiments

Abstract

Policies regarding public health, the environment, and urban planning present in many European countries today are still mostly partitioned, as are the economic resources made available by the central governments. It is necessary to change the paradigm and integrate all the different aspects of health and quality of life of residents and city users to define the physical space of the city and ensure that financial resources from different sources can be integrated. To do this, it is necessary to understand the factors that influence an individual’s state of health and, more broadly, the health of a community or population, and how urban space relates to them. Briefly, the so-called “determinants of health” need to be understood. Experimentation should be considered as a necessary action to increase awareness of the relationships between urban planning and determinants of health, along with evaluations of the impact of urban plans and projects on health and the quality of life in cities. Experimentation in the URBACT II PIC Program “Building Healthy Communities” has moved along these lines.

Rosalba D’Onofrio, Elio Trusiani

Healthy Urban Planning in Europe

Frontmatter

Chapter 4. The Need for New Urban Planning for Healthy Cities: Reorienting Urban Planning Towards Healthy Public Policy

Abstract

The role of local public administrations in favoring dialogue among different players—professionals and workers in public health, urban planners, politicians, and the civil community—is fundamental. All these figures can assume common responsibilities in constructing plans and projects for the city, overcoming the gap between different skills, approaches, and languages. What is certain is that the role of the central (national) government in health policies and city planning cannot be ignored: national approaches, laws, and regulations affect local plans and policies. Some experiments made in recent years in Finland, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Denmark, etc., on attempts to integrate urban planning and health have felt the effects of some important innovations on the central level [public-health reforms, national recommendations, guidelines on the Health Impact Assessment (HIA), etc.]. Other countries, such as France and Italy, began to address these themes only a few years ago, and on the national level, legislative references are still lacking. Little experimentation has been made in the field, and the experiments carried out have mostly regarded the application of the HIA to individual plans and projects. At any rate, there is growing interest even in these countries.

Rosalba D’Onofrio, Elio Trusiani

Chapter 5. Health Promotion and Urban Sustainability: A Perspective on Duality

Abstract

The correlation between human health and sustainability/climate change is the fruit of more than twenty years of research activities in Europe. Health creates the conditions for sustainability while simultaneously being conditioned by it, just as sustainability, intended as environmental, economic, and social sustainability, creates and is conditioned by human health. The two concepts, in theory as well as in practice, cannot be separated, but should be understood as interdependent. This means that strategies oriented towards sustainable development should be correlated with strategies to promote health and vice versa. In this sense, experiences within Europe (London, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Malmö, Rotterdam, and Turin, to name a few) and the rest of the world (Boston, Jakarta, Medellin, New Orleans, New York) constitute an interesting record for extrapolation with respect to some keywords running in the direction of health and quality of life in cities: environmental and social safety, public spaces and inclusive cities, and meaningful design references, on both large and small scales.

Rosalba D’Onofrio, Elio Trusiani

Chapter 6. The Crucial Point in Assessing Plans and Projects for Healthy Cities

Abstract

Assessment of the impacts that the planning model and planning choices can have on the health of people and their quality of life is entrusted in many European countries and beyond to specific tools that are only rarely obligatory and integrated in ordinary planning tools. Their task is to evaluate the effects that the choices of plans, projects, and interventions can have on human health to correct them or orient their activation. In European countries, the HIA is required mostly for some categories of interventions, but rarely in the case of urban plans. Despite the evidence of certain risks, it can be of great assistance on the road to integrating urban planning and health, when the latter is carried out in conjunction with the former and with the urban project, later entering the phase of plan management through monitoring actions.

Rosalba D’Onofrio, Elio Trusiani

Chapter 7. Comparing European Cities on the Road to Integrating Health and Urban Planning

Abstract

The effective difficulty of intersecting the themes of health and well-being within urban-planning tools and how much, instead, this relationship is desirable even for the goals of promoting sustainable development, suggests investigating the theme with the aid of some current experiments in European cities, selecting some key questions around which the wager on integration is made. The comparison regards essentially medium or small cities (Belfast, Bristol, Ljubljana, Odense, Pécs, Poznan, Rennes, Turku, Modena, Udine); an inter-municipal association (Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur, PACA); and two metropolitan areas (Turin and Bologna). The results of this research mainly regard the content of the urban plans from the strategic to the operational levels with reference to the themes of health and well-being. In addition, aspects connecting the plans’ choices to the realization of interventions to design the places and empower local communities are investigated. Appendix 2 presents three of these experiences: Bristol’s Parks and Green Space Strategy; Rennes’ Restructuration de la Halte Ferroviaire de Pontchaillou; Healthy Poznan—Development Strategy for the River Warta; and the Hirvensalo District Master Plan.

Rosalba D’Onofrio, Elio Trusiani

Planning and Designing Healthy Cities and Communities

Frontmatter

Chapter 8. Improving Health Through Community Urban Planning

Abstract

On the one hand, contemporary cities are called to come to terms with the local community’s renewed role as co-manager, co-designer, and co-producer of the living spaces. On the other hand, they must consider the role that urban design can play in designing health-based cities. In order to highlight and reflect on these themes, this chapter draws on some best practices: New York and Toronto for North America and Medellín, Santiago de Chile, and Porto Alegre for South America. These themes hold notable importance in urban policies and, albeit from different points of view, aim to improve the quality of life in these cities. The experiences referred to in this Chapter show how urban planning favorable to health amplifies the need to draw on local and experiential knowledge of the urban environment reflected in the community.

Rosalba D’Onofrio, Elio Trusiani

Chapter 9. Best Practices Around the World: Some Suggestions for European Cities

Abstract

In addition to European experiences, which are often trapped within consolidated paths, in other parts of the world, some cities are opening up to welcoming experimental forms of small-scale bottom-up urban planning. Questions related to social sustainability are in many cases the bearers of innovation outside of conventional urban planning and design paths. The examples of North American cities rely a lot on experimentation through close involvement with civil society, which assumes responsibility for the city’s living spaces, becoming a promoter of health-based initiatives, even from the economic point of view. Experimentation in the field is frequently accompanied by guidelines and tools charged with providing technical offices and designers with orientations rather than rigid rules. In addition, the impression is that it is the context that guides the interventions, avoiding simplistic, ineffective generalizations. With all the differences among the situations, health and urban planning are also themes addressed by South American cities. In many cases, they deal with approaches that are specifically health related and aimed at guaranteeing a minimum level of services, especially in the very diffuse areas of contemporary urban “informality” (vilas, favelas, etc.).

Rosalba D’Onofrio, Elio Trusiani

Chapter 10. Urban Planning and Design Centred on Health Metrics

Abstract

Recent years have been marked by numerous initiatives aimed at promoting experiments in the field, implementing the WHO’s call in 2013 to move from the rhetoric of numerous policies aimed at promoting health and safety in the city to practical activities. All planning scales are asked to provide resilient design proposals capable of repositioning and reprogramming urban spaces in order to satisfy the needs of the community with respect to the potential impacts of urban transformations on the health and well-being of people. Reference to the context is fundamental, but it is also necessary to develop synergies among the different strategies and the different scales of the project. This includes a process of internal and external consultation in which the local community plays a fundamental role as the basic expression of the present and future social sustainability and resilience of the project. It is precisely in terms of resilience that some important cases of strategies, actions, and projects are found in Europe. Rotterdam in Holland and Copenhagen in Denmark are among the top examples.

Rosalba D’Onofrio, Elio Trusiani

Titel: Urban Planning for Healthy European Cities
verfasst von: Dr. Rosalba D'Onofrio
Prof. Elio Trusiani
Verlag: Springer International Publishing
Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-71144-7
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-71143-0
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71144-7