Healthy Planning and Design

This seminar focuses on the role of gender in healthy planning and design in two main contexts: therapeutic environments in hospitals and other therapeutic spaces; and healthy urban planning.

A healthy urban environment involves the design of hospitals and other treatment and therapeutic spaces alongside a wide range of indicators such as access to green space, decent housing, employment and transport. A core theme of the WHO Healthy Cities programme is healthy urban planning. Growing interest in the connections between planning and public health shows that healthy urban planning is set to become a key feature of urban design and urban development. How do these global and regional initiatives affect people and practitioners at local level? Can health be planned in to new and existing developments?

The promotion of ‘healthy’ cities builds on earlier Agenda 21 initiatives aimed at promoting cross-sectoral linkages across health and environment. The WHO qualities of a healthy city are:

• A clean, safe physical environment of a high quality (including housing quality);
• An ecosystem that is stable now and in the long term;
• A high degree of participation in and control by the citizens over decisions affecting their lives, health and well being;
• The meeting of basic needs (food, water, shelter, income, safety and work) for all;
• Access to a wide variety of experiences and resources;
• An optimum level of appropriate public health and sickness care

WHO and the UN also recognise the significant role of gender in health care and promotion.  How does this apply in 21st century London?  Should planning for health, both in therapeutic places and the wider urban environment, be gendered or mainstreamed?  A pivotal seminar in the LWPF’s series Capital designs: women and planning in contemporary London, Healthy planning and design raises some particularly challenging issues.