Healthy Cities: Public Health through Urban Planning

Healthy Cities: Public Health through Urban Planning, Chinmoy Sarkar, Chris Webster & John Gallacher, Cheltenham, Edward Elgar, 2014, 424 pp., £90.00, ISBN 978 1 78195 571 0We are all likely familiar with negative newspaper headlines like these: 'Is living in the suburbs making you fat? ', 'Abandoned landfills polluting UK rivers', 'Urgently needed: solution to city gridlock' and 'Crime is committed at a home in England and Wales every 7 SECONDS'. For planners, though, they recognise the underlying relationship between public health and the design, development and management of the urban environment suggested by the headlines, and realise how difficult it is to successfully plan cities that are also healthy for the public. Academics and practitioners have been investigating the topic for some time now, trying to shed light on the multiple influences and causes of poor health in cities (consider the sanitary movement of the 1840s, the Garden City movement of the late 1800s and early 1900s, the introduction of new towns in the UK that provided easier access to healthcare in the mid 1900s and the study of neighbourhood walkability and food deserts today). It is within this context that this book may be situated.A good-sized, 424-page book, Healthy Cities is roughly divided into four sections. The first section (Introduction, Chapters 2-3) introduces the topic of healthy cities and discusses the relationship between town planning and public health. We are given a history lesson with respect to the dominant public health and planning paradigms of the day, including the development of the authors' own multi-faceted, multi-scalar, integrated paradigm, called the urban health niche, which is outlined in some detail. The authors' account of town planning in the UK is very good, recalling the late Sir Peter Hall's Cities of Tomorrow, albeit in a condensed version. While covering a lot of ground in these chapters that would be relevant to planners (including information about epidemiology that might sound alien, but has utility nonetheless), there are a couple of big, recent projects that could have deserved mention. One is the WHO's Global Network of Age-friendly Cities and Communities programme, of which there are about a dozen UK cities involved. The other is the UK Government's Foresight programme on Mental Capital and Wellbeing in which the physical environment is seen to play an important role in people's quality of life. In terms of the urban health niche paradigm, the authors seem to adopt the 'kitchen sink' approach of throwing many different variables and scales into their framework. While this may be more comprehensive than previous paradigms' views on public health and town planning, the framework is difficult to understand at times and visually confusing. Opportunities to simplify the language (e.g., what is the difference between an urban niche, an urban health niche, a health niche, an ecological niche and a coalesced niche? ) and create more striking visualisations may help planners to understand what the paradigm is saying and, possibly, how they might adopt such a paradigm in practice.The second section (Chapter 4) comprises a systematic review of the relevant literature within epidemiology, public health and health geography. …