Background
The directory is an online repository of open access resources and tools that provide information about the importance of planning and designing urban areas from a health perspective, as well as concrete guidance on how to do it. In the directory, you will find resources that describe the importance of considering health in urban and territorial planning, tools that quantify the health and/or socioeconomic impact of planning and designing urban areas from a health perspective, the description of successful initiatives, or training materials on urban planning and health, among others.
It is intended to be useful for all the actors and decision-makers who influence urban environments and/or are concerned with the health of the population. This includes a variety of actors from different sectors and stakeholder groups: national governments, local authorities, public health and healthcare professionals, actors and stakeholders involved in urban planning and design, academics, and civil society. The directory might be of interest to support the work towards developing healthy urban environments, for all those interested in the basis for our collective wellbeing.
In the directory you will find the list of resources already identified in the publication Integrating health in urban and territorial planning: a sourcebook (2020). All these resources are properly classified according to their characteristics (e.g., type of resource, language, author or publisher, publication date, geographical scope, etc.) and its URL links have been updated (last update, July 2022). These have been assessed according to the inclusion criteria of the sourcebook.
To find out more about the background to the sourcebook and indeed the broader initiative of which it is part, we suggest you read Supporting a healthy planet, healthy people and health equity through urban and territorial planning (2022). Whether you are involved in policy, practice or research, this article outlines useful key messages. It discusses how you may incorporate the materials into your work, lists action points and future agendas, and ends with a call for wider collaboration with the development of this initiative.
Integrating health in urban and territorial planning: a sourcebook (UN-Habitat and WHO, 2020) is one of the latest publications of the joint work on healthy urban planning by the WHO and UN-Habitat, and it builds from the principles of other previous joint publications.
The “International Guidelines on Urban and Territorial Planning” (UN-Habitat, 2015) are part of an enabling framework for addressing the challenges of urbanization. The “New Urban Agenda” (United Nations, 2016), a product of Habitat III, was launched in 2016 and it was a blueprint for sustainable urbanization. As a follow-up to that, the WHO published “Health as a pulse of the New Urban Agenda” (WHO, 2016a), a document that recognises the relevance of health in all policies and the importance of considering health when addressing Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) other than SDG 3 (health and well-being). Likewise in 2016, the WHO and UN-Habitat published the “Global report on urban health: equitable healthier cities for sustainable development” (WHO, 2016b), which suggests that progress in health depends not only on the strength of health systems, but also on shaping urban environments, taking into account health inequalities. The publication of “Integrating health in urban and territorial planning: a sourcebook” (UN-Habitat and WHO, 2020) was a crucial step forward. It was launched in 2020 to guide decision-makers and other actors toward developing cities that are planned and built with a focus on human and environmental health, showing how an integrated approach to health can influence decisions on sectors such as housing, transport, energy, and water and sanitation. The sourcebook identifies existing resources and tools that offer practical guidance on how to integrate health into urban and territorial planning.
The directory compiles all these resources (and others) and allows a user-friendly online search, having all the resources properly categorized.