Yueqing’s Healthy Future: A Case Study in Design Planning for Healthy Urbanization

Abstract

Yueqing’s Healthy Future is a context-based analysis for improving urban health against a background of unprecedented regional population transition in China’s mid-tier cities. This extended case study considers how China’s economic ascendancy, having ignited an epidemiological transition from communicable diseases more prevalent in rural areas toward largely preventable, non-communicable diseases typical of twenty-first century urban lifestyles, can facilitate more sustainable models of future urban development. Yueqing’s Healthy Future begins as sustainable infrastructure design within a framework of measurable standards to intentionally redress China’s environmental health crisis and resulting urban health problems. Key determinates for urban livability are amply addressed: urban infrastructure design, the built environment, the incorporation of nature, quality of life, and health and wellness. Prescriptive guidance to optimize urban health and long-term sustainability in the process of urban growth and development accompanies this case study: urban climate change resilience, urban mobility, and strategies for healthier buildings. This assessment includes recommendations by a joint research team from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Although these proposals reflect actual climatic, ecological, and environmental policy conditions of Yueqing, China and thus are tailored to improve that city’s sustainability profile, the recommendations may inform urban projects elsewhere with similar urban infrastructure and ecological conditions already in place.