The Need for New Urban Planning for Healthy Cities: Reorienting Urban Planning Towards Healthy Public Policy

Abstract

The role of local public administrations in favoring dialogue among different players—professionals and workers in public health, urban planners, politicians, and the civil community—is fundamental. All these figures can assume common responsibilities in constructing plans and projects for the city, overcoming the gap between different skills, approaches, and languages. What is certain is that the role of the central (national) government in health policies and city planning cannot be ignored: national approaches, laws, and regulations affect local plans and policies. Some experiments made in recent years in Finland, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Denmark, etc., on attempts to integrate urban planning and health have felt the effects of some important innovations on the central level [public-health reforms, national recommendations, guidelines on the Health Impact Assessment (HIA), etc.]. Other countries, such as France and Italy, began to address these themes only a few years ago, and on the national level, legislative references are still lacking. Little experimentation has been made in the field, and the experiments carried out have mostly regarded the application of the HIA to individual plans and projects. At any rate, there is growing interest even in these countries.