Urban Planning and Public Health:

Abstract

Urban planning, also called city and regional planning, is a multidisciplinary field in which professionals work to improve the welfare of persons and communities by creating more convenient, equitable, healthful, efficient, and attractive places now and for the future. The centerpiece of urban planning activities is a "master plan," which can take many forms, including comprehensive plans, neighborhood plans, community action plans, regulatory and incentive strategies, economic development plans, and disaster preparedness plans. Traditionally, these plans include assessing and planning for community needs in some or all of the following areas: transportation, housing, commercial/office buildings, natural resource utilization, environmental protection, and health-care infrastructure. Urban planning and public health share common missions and perspectives. Both aim to improve human well-being, emphasize needs assessment and service delivery, manage complex social systems, focus at the population level, and rely on community-based participatory methods. Both fields focus on the needs of vulnerable populations. Throughout their development, both fields have broadened their perspectives. Initially, public health most often used a biomedical model (examining normal/abnormal functioning of the human organism), and urban planning often relied on a geographic model (analysis of human needs or interactions in a spatial context). However, both fields have expanded their tools and perspectives, in part because of the influence of the other. Urban planning and public health have been intertwined for most of their histories. In 1854, British physician John Snow used geographic mapping of an outbreak of cholera in London to identify a public water pump as the outbreak's source. Geographic analysis is a key planning tool shared by urban planning and public health. In the mid-1800s, planners such as Frederick Law Olmsted bridged the gap between the fields by advancing the concept that community design contributes to physical and mental health; serving as President Lincoln's U.S. Sanitary Commission Secretary; and designing hundreds of places, including New York's Central Park. By 1872, the disciplines were so aligned that two of the seven founders of the American Public Health Association were urban designers (an architect and a housing specialist). In 1926, the U.S. Supreme Court, in validating zoning and land-use law as a legal government authority in Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty, cited the protection of public health as part of its justification. Other connections have included 1) pioneering urbanist Jane Jacobs, who during the 1960s, called for community design that offered safe and convenient options for walking, biking, and impromptu social interaction; and 2) the Healthy Cities movement, which began in Europe and the United States during the 1980s and now includes projects in approximately 1,000 cities that in various ways highlight the role of health as much more than the presence of medical care.