This publication considers urbanism as a fundamental preventive discipline, one which has the capacity to enhance the health and living quality of urban populations. It investigates the relationships between urbanism, urban health, and the built environment, with a specific focus on physical activity as one of the principal contributors to health conditions in the city. From an urban design and planning perspective, author Elena Dorato tackles the complex relationships and cause-and-effect processes that link the characteristics of cities to the well-being of their populations. A particular focus of her essay is on the dichotomy between the urban and human bodies.
Through an approach strongly oriented to socio-health contexts and healthcare facilities, with multidisciplinary contributions on the methodological and technical aspects, or legislative issues, the book provides tools and design strategies to plan and realize therapeutic places and healing gardens for care, rehabilitation, interaction, and social inclusion. It addresses all the technical and medical professionals - like Architects, Urban Planners, Agronomist, Sociologists, Epidemiologists, Public Health experts, Policy Makers, etc. - wishing to explore the link between built environment, well-being, and health, referring in particular to the direct relationship between places and therapy.
Care and the City is a cross-disciplinary collection of chapters examining urban social spaces, in which caring and uncaring practices intersect and shape people’s everyday lives. While asking how care and uncare are embedded in the urban condition, the book focuses on inequalities in caring relations and the ways they are acknowledged, reproduced, and overcome in various spaces, discourses, and practices. This book provides a pathway for urban scholars to start engaging with approaches to conceptualize care in the city through a critical-reflexive analysis of processes of urbanization. It pursues a systematic integration of empirical, methodological, theoretical, and ethical approaches to care in urban studies, while overcoming a crisis-centered reading of care and the related ambivalences in care debates, practices, and spaces. These strands are elaborated via a conceptual framework of care and situated within broader theoretical debates on cities, urbanization, and urban development with detailed case studies from Europe, the Americas, and Asia. By establishing links to various fields of knowledge, this book seeks to systematically introduce debates on care to the interconnecting fields of urban studies, planning theory, and related disciplines for the first time.
Design for Inclusion Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics (AHFE 2022), July 24–28, 2022, New York, USA
This book explores the topic of proximity and its relations in the design of contemporary urban fabrics and public spaces. The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and reflections on the future of cities have lately shed light on the concept of proximity, which is intended as the relationship between communities and urban functions and as relations among people, built spaces, and open spaces. The proximity is a historic and fertile field of interest for American and Northern European urban studies; it is a spatial and social program seemingly surpassed by the styles and rhythms of contemporary city life, but today it is back in vogue with different purposes. Meanwhile, the action research developed by the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies at the Politecnico di Milano for the Municipality of Milan reached its conclusion (2018–2020). The research work focused on contextualizing the new M4 Metro line stations under construction, and jointed mobility flows and places, long-range networks and local ones, boosting the idea of metro stations as regenerative urban thresholds and urban platforms for enabling environmental, sustainable settlement, and active mobility systems. In other words, the action research for Milan shows how to achieve the concept of proximity in the urban design practice in a dense, stratified, and complex urban context.
This forward-looking resource recasts the concept of healthy cities as not only a safe, pleasant, and green built environment, but also one that creates and sustains health by addressing social, economic, and political conditions. It describes collaborations between city planning and public health creating a contemporary concept of urban governance—a democratically-informed process that embraces values like equity. Models, critiques, and global examples illustrate institutional change, community input, targeted assessment, and other means of addressing longstanding sources of urban health challenges. In these ambitious pages, healthy cities are rooted firmly in the worldwide movement toward balanced and sustainable urbanization, developed not to disguise or displace entrenched health and social problems, but to encourage and foster solutions. Included in the coverage: Towards healthy urban governance in the century of the city“/li> Healthy cities emerge: Toronto, Ottawa, Copenhagen The role of policy coalitions in understanding community participation in healthy cities projects Health impact assessment at the local level The logic of method for evaluating healthy cities Plus: extended reports on healthy cities and communities in North and Latin America, Africa, Europe, Asia, Oceania, and the Middle East Healthy Cities will interest and inspire community leaders, activists, politicians, and entrepreneurs working to improve health and well-being at the local level, as well as public health and urban development scholars and professionals.
Mounting scientific evidence generated over the past decade highlights the significant role of our citiesê built environments in shaping our health and well-being. In this book, the authors conceptualize the •urban health nicheê as a novel approach to
This book aims to refocus urban planners on the implications of their work for human health and well-being. Provides practical advice on ways to integrate health and urban planning.
Building on the success of their Global Street Design Guide, the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO)-Global Designing Cities Initiative (GDCI) Streets for Kids program has developed child-focused design guidance to inspire leaders, inform practitioners, and empower communities around the world to consider their city from the eyes of a child. The guidance in Designing Streets for Kids captures international best practices, strategies, programs, and policies that cities around the world have used to design streets and public spaces that are safe and appealing to children from their earliest days. The guidance also highlights tactics for engaging children in the design process, an often-overlooked approach that can dramatically transform how streets are designed and used.
The built environment influences health and well-being in a myriad of ways. Some neighbourhoods are plagued by busy roads that are a constant source of danger, noise, and air pollution. In some cities there is inadequate green space for children to play and socialise safely. Yet, this book argues, it does not have to be this way. With focus on human health, well-being, and flourishing, this book explores the ways in which people’s lives are impacted by the built environment and how we can create, adapt, and design healthy and inclusive places. The volume explores the relationship between urban design and human flourishing and initiates broad discussions around relevant questions such as ‘What is a healthy place?’, ‘What influences our perceptions of built environment more? Is it our age or our cultural background?’. The book includes six chapters from internationally renowned authors who attempt to unpack some of the key aspects that urban designers need to consider in order to create places that enable – rather than constrain – individuals and communities to live rich fulfilling lives. This book will be of great value to students, scholars, and researchers interested in urban design, planning, and in exploring how built environment impacts health and happiness. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Urban Design.
