Healthy Cities: Public Health through Urban Planning

Mounting scientific evidence generated over the past decade highlights the significant role of our cities' built environments in shaping our health and well-being. In this book, the authors conceptualize the urban health niche' as a novel approach to public health and healthy-city planning that integrates the diverse and multi-level health determinants present in a city system.

The authors trace the origins of public health and city planning, drawing upon the shifting paradigms of epidemiology. Advanced network analysis techniques are employed to examine multi-scale associations between individual-level health outcomes and built environment features such as density, land-use mix and road network configuration.

Healthy Cities will prove a fascinating read for an interdisciplinary body of scholars, practitioners and policy makers within the domains of public policy, regional and urban studies, urban planning, spatial epidemiology, health geography, sociology, public health and psychology.

Contents: Foreword Preface 1. Introduction 2. Tracing the Ever-evolving Relationship between Urban Planning and Public Health 3. The Urban Health Niche: A New Paradigm in Healthy City Planning 4. Spatial Determinants of Health 5. Spatial Design Network Analysis for Urban Health (sDNA-UH) 6. Urban Built Environment Configuration and Psychological Distress in Later Life: Cross Sectional Results from the Caerphilly Prospective Study (CaPS) 7. Built Environment Configuration and Change in Body Mass Index: The Caerphilly Prospective Study (CaPS) 8. Does Accessibility to Health Promoting Services Affect Self-perceived Health, HADS Anxiety and Depression? Findings from a Multi-level Analysis of Older Men in Caerphilly 9. Conclusion References Appendices Index