Menu
City Know-hows
This study sheds light on Indian planners’ perceptions of health integration in urban and regional planning, highlighting implementation obstacles as well as acknowledgement of the topic’s significance.
Share
Target audience
Urban planners, public health professionals, medical professionals in India and decision/policy makers
The problem
Planners recognize the impact of social, economic, and environmental factors on health and are seeking to include health-related initiatives into planning. However, there are major challenges to implementing measures for developing healthier built environments. While there is an acknowledgement that there is limited inclusion of health, there is a lack of studies that focus on finding the challenges faced by Indian spatial planners.
What we did and why
The present research investigates barriers to integrating health considerations into planning frameworks, this research aims to bridge this knowledge gap and provide practical insights for urban planners and public health specialists in India.100 planners working in India in the field of planning participated in the survey resulting in understanding planning professionals’ perspectives on adding health as a planning parameter and to identify hurdles to inclusion.
Our study’s contribution
The study draws attention to issues such a lack of interdisciplinary teamwork, poor health data, and limitations applying health objectives in planning.
Impacts for city policy and practice
The study reveals key themes for health integration in planning: local-level interventions, considering the impacts of planning, strengthening policy frameworks and stakeholder engagement, and governmental support.
Further information
Full research article:
Health and urban planning: status and barriers from planners’ perspectives by Pallavi Tiwari and Mayank Mathur.
Related posts
The built food environment has a significant influence on population health, for better and for worse. Evidence shows that urban planning can play a major role in creating food environments that support healthy food choices; however current transit-oriented developments have not yet considered access to healthy food outlets. We found evidence that a high proportion (79 – 84%) of food outlets could be classified as ‘unhealthy’ across eight transport hubs identified for accelerated development in New South Wales.
The degradation of the urban freshwater ecosystem has consequences to human population of cities. We proposed and tested an approach to identify and quantify the risk for the populations living near urban streams within the city, due to the degradation of ecosystems services.
The study by collecting data from a sample in a developing and rapidly urbanizing country in South Asia highlighted the importance of green space interventions to promote urban dwellers’ contact with urban green spaces and physical activity levels. Moreover, it highlighted differences in urban green space usage behaviours based on differences in sociodemographic characteristics, suggesting the necessity to target certain sub-population groups more than others.
