Integrating health in urban and territorial planning
Sourcebook
Overview
The way we plan and build our cities defines our quality of life. It affects not only the quality of our living spaces and transport, but also the air we breathe, the water we drink, and our access to nutritious food, education, health care services and employment.
Over the years, we have learned valuable lessons about urban and territorial planning, which has developed into a multisectoral discipline. It is now commonplace to consider environmental, social, health and well-being as key determinants when planning cities. One of the main challenges today is to ensure that urban and regional leaders have the knowledge and guidance to integrate health and well-being into their planning processes.
Integrating health in urban and territorial planning is a sourcebook for urban planners, city managers, health professionals, and all those interested in the basis for our collective wellbeing. This sourcebook is the latest result of the close and longstanding collaboration between UN-Habitat and the World Health Organization, also demonstrated by the 2016 publication, Global report on urban health: equitable healthier cities for sustainable development. The sourcebook – for urban leaders, health and planning professionals – provides the health dimension in the practice and implementation of urban and territorial planning. It is designed as a tool to assist national governments, local authorities, planning professionals, civil society organizations and health professionals, by helping to improve planning frameworks and practice through the incorporation of health considerations, at all levels of governance and across the spatial-planning continuum.
The sourcebook also shows how an integrated approach to health can influence decisions on sectors such as housing, transport, energy, and water and sanitation. More importantly, it considers how they are all linked to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Health features prominently in the inter-linkages between and among the Sustainable Development Goals, including Goal 11, on sustainable cities and communities, cutting across almost all others and across traditional policy and disciplinary silos. The sourcebook articulates how public health professionals are crucial to good urban and territorial planning. They have a valuable and unique set of skills to bring to the table and can help ensure that routine urban and territorial planning activities, such as economic development or transport planning, are focused on delivering population health and well-being. We encourage you to make use of this sourcebook so that together we can improve our urban environment, our health and our well-being through the realization of the New Urban Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals, so that no one and no place is left behind
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