Urban Environment Planning

Reference thanks to the AMICOR Jorge Ossanai

Shaping cities for health: complexity and the planning of urban environments in the 21st century

Prof Yvonne Rydin PhD a , Ana Bleahu MA a, Prof Michael Davies PhD a, Julio D Dávila PhD a, Prof Sharon Friel PhD a b,Giovanni De Grandis PhD a, Prof Nora Groce PhD a, Pedro C Hallal PhD c, Ian Hamilton MSc a, Prof Philippa Howden-Chapman PhDd, Ka-Man Lai PhD a, Prof CJ Lim AA Dipl a, Juliana Martins MA a, David Osrin MRCP a, Ian Ridley PhD e, Ian Scott PhD a, Myfanwy Taylor MSc a, Paul Wilkinson FRCP f, James Wilson PhD a

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Executive summary

The Healthy Cities movement has been in process for almost 30 years, and the features needed to transform a city into a healthy one are becoming increasingly understood. What is less well understood, however, is how to deliver the potential health benefits and how to ensure that they reach all citizens in urban areas across the world. This task is becoming increasingly important because most of the world's population already live in cities, and, with high rates of urbanisation, many millions more will soon do so in the coming decades.

The Commission met during November, 2009, to June, 2011, to provide an analysis of how health outcomes can be improved through modification of the physical fabric of towns and cities and to discuss the role that urban planning can have in the delivering of health improvements. The Commission began from the premise that cities are complex systems, with urban health outcomes dependent on many interactions and feedback loops, so that prediction within the planning process is fraught with difficulties and unintended consequences are common./.../