Improving people’s health and well-being was a foundational objective of the discipline of urban planning. This concern continues today, albeit focusing on different threats to health from sedentary and isolating lifestyles, as well as environmental degradation. Urban planners increasingly work along side colleagues in the professions of public health and clinical medicine promoting and supporting healthy behaviors as part of everyday living. While the goal of improving health and well-being is shared, the achievement mechanisms differ. Planning is concerned about the built environment—the places where communities live, are employed, enjoy recreational pursuits, and connect with others. This is the backdrop to everyday living from infancy to older age and has a central role in supporting healthy behaviors, especially those which address major risk factors for chronic disease. Planning aims to create a sustainable built environment where it is easy, enjoyable, and safe to be physically active for transport and recreation, socially connect with others to ameliorate loneliness and isolation, and to fuel fit bodies and minds through eating fresh, nutritious, and affordable food readily available in nearby shops and harvested from local gardens. This chapter provides an overview of how urban planning is working to achieve this health-supportive environment. Key challenges are then explored, ranging from the role of planning to lead and facilitate this work, to the embrace of transdisciplinary approaches that bring traditionally siloed professions, research traditions, and practice together in mutually respectful ways. The chapter concludes optimistically with hope for a future that embeds the attainment of health in everyday living activities for all in the community to create an environment that supports people’s health and that of the planet, upon which all life ultimately depends.

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Health-Supportive Environments

  • Susan M. Thompson,
  • Jennifer L. Kent

摘要

Improving people’s health and well-being was a foundational objective of the discipline of urban planning. This concern continues today, albeit focusing on different threats to health from sedentary and isolating lifestyles, as well as environmental degradation. Urban planners increasingly work along side colleagues in the professions of public health and clinical medicine promoting and supporting healthy behaviors as part of everyday living. While the goal of improving health and well-being is shared, the achievement mechanisms differ. Planning is concerned about the built environment—the places where communities live, are employed, enjoy recreational pursuits, and connect with others. This is the backdrop to everyday living from infancy to older age and has a central role in supporting healthy behaviors, especially those which address major risk factors for chronic disease. Planning aims to create a sustainable built environment where it is easy, enjoyable, and safe to be physically active for transport and recreation, socially connect with others to ameliorate loneliness and isolation, and to fuel fit bodies and minds through eating fresh, nutritious, and affordable food readily available in nearby shops and harvested from local gardens. This chapter provides an overview of how urban planning is working to achieve this health-supportive environment. Key challenges are then explored, ranging from the role of planning to lead and facilitate this work, to the embrace of transdisciplinary approaches that bring traditionally siloed professions, research traditions, and practice together in mutually respectful ways. The chapter concludes optimistically with hope for a future that embeds the attainment of health in everyday living activities for all in the community to create an environment that supports people’s health and that of the planet, upon which all life ultimately depends.