Healthy cities and planning

摘要

The interface between urban planning and human health has had a long history. Public health concerns arising from poor sanitation drove civic design in Roman settlements and major urban planning reforms in industrialised countries in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, our understanding of how the planning of cities can affect health outcomes has widened to incorporate a greater range of health impacts - obesity, asthma, cardiovascular disease, cancer, to name but a few - and aspects of urban planning such as green space provision, traffic management, urban climate control, air quality management and building standards. We now appreciate that building health into cities is an important role for planning systems, both in the rapidly growing cities of low- to middle-income countries and also in the established cities of high-income countries where there are possibilities of 'retrofitting for health'.