Smart Planning for Healthy Cities (Urban Space Is Not Just a Place)

Cities are constantly increasing their importance, from any point of view: population, energy, food, transport. Healthy cities aim at wellbeing for all by creating urban spaces capable of inclusive community prosperity. Place is the combined tangible and intangible context of a location. It includes the integrated urban ecosystem: the constructed, environmental, social, economic, and cultural status. It is a human, natural, and artificial habitat whose combined conditions are able to upgrade or harm health and wellbeing. Its significant impact on people's life happens through a variety of ways, positive or negative, physical or mental. There are several urban determinants that affect the health indicators, which help us measure this impact. This process is named health impact assessment. It is conducted via specific tools, and till now it showed us that the urban environment affects public health much more than the medical system. On the other side, only vigorous communities are able to ensure thriving culture and economy, urban and regional sustainability and development.

Promoting Resilient and Healthy Cities for Everyone in an Urban Planning Context by Assessing Green Area Accessibility

Rapid economic development and population growth has led to urban densification and massive land use changes, putting pressure on both ecosystems, and people. In this context, public health issues have become crucial for cities to address to ensure they remain livable and healthy for everyone. Since the health challenges of cities tend to manifest themselves differently among different population groups—e.g., groups of higher socioeconomic status tend to be correlated with better health than groups of low socioeconomic status—closing the health gap has become a priority for creating healthy cities for everyone. More greenness close to where people live and better accessibility to green areas has been shown to be useful for improving human health and for tackling health inequalities. This paper aims at developing a method for supporting urban planners and policymakers on where to geographically prioritize investments in green infrastructure to contribute to closing the health gap and promote community resilience through improving public health. Using the City of Stockholm as a pilot, we apply a GIS analysis to identify vulnerable population groups in relation to geotagged empirical human health- and socio-economic data. By then assessing vulnerable populations in relation to population numbers and accessibility to urban green areas, an Urban Green Opportunity Map (UGOM) was created, identifying focus areas where investment in green infrastructure will contribute most to closing the health gap and building community resilience.

Vulnerability and Resilience of Urban Traffic to Precipitation in China

The concept of Healthy Cities, introduced by the World Health Organization, demonstrates the value of health for the whole urban system. As one of the most important components of urban systems, transportation plays an important role in Healthy Cities. Many transportation evaluation systems focus on factors such as road networks, parking spaces, transportation speed, accessibility, convenience, and commuting time, while the vulnerability and resilience of urban transportation are rarely evaluated. This study presents the preliminary progress in the evaluation of traffic vulnerability and resilience during precipitation events in 39 Chinese cities. Traffic congestion index data, derived from the Baidu Map Smart Transportation Platform, and rainfall data, derived from NASA’s global precipitation measurement, are utilized. Traffic vulnerability index, traffic resilience index, and the corresponding quantitative methods are proposed, and the analysis results are presented. This study is of value in improving the understanding of urban traffic vulnerability and resilience, and in enabling the quantitative evaluation of them in urban health assessment and the Healthy Cities program.

From the Guest Editors: Happy and Healthy Cities

Cities in the 21st century are magnets for people and business [...]

Design of Slow Traffic System in Historic District from the Perspective of Healthy City

Health is not only derived from a good personal lifestyle, but also from a good external social environment. This article summarizes relevant researches on healthy cities and slow-moving systems at home and abroad, and discusses how to understand the environmental space of historical locations from a human perspective, and use the concept of healthy cities to study the use of various spaces. Taking the Tanhualin Historic District in Wuhan as an example, this paper analyzes the current situation of the Tanhualin Historic District and the existing problems in the transportation system, and proposes a new design model for the slow system design of Tanhualin from the perspective of a healthy city.

Healthy cities after COVID-19 pandemic: the just ecofeminist healthy cities approach

The COVID-19 pandemic crisis has compromised the ‘healthy cities’ vision, as it has unveiled the need to give more prominence to caring tasks while addressing intersectional social inequities and environmental injustices. However, much-needed transdisciplinary approaches to study and address post-COVID-19 healthy cities challenges and agendas have been scarce so far. To address this gap, we propose a ‘just ecofeminist healthy cities’ research approach, which would be informed by the caring city, environmental justice, just ecofeminist sustainability and the healthy cities paradigms and research fields. Our proposed approach aims to achieve the highest standards of human health possible for the whole population—yet putting the health of socially underprivileged residents in the centre—through preserving and/or improving the existing physical, social and political environment. Importantly, the proposed approach recognises all spheres of daily life (productive, reproductive, personal and political) and their connections with inequities, justice and power dynamics. Last, the just ecofeminist healthy cities approach understands human health as interconnected with the health of non-human animals and the ecosystem. We illustrate the proposed new approach focusing on the implications for women’s health and public green spaces research and propose principles and practices for its operationalisation.