Building Smart, Healthy Cities – Tools for embedding health considerations into urban planning

Since the mid-19th century it has been said that 'A nation's health is a nation's wealth.' And certainly the same is true for cities: A city's health is a city's wealth. So how can health be better facilitated through urban planning? This three-hour training will stimulate participants to dig deeper into how health can be embedded in urban planning, using tools developed through the new Building Health Cities project.

The USAID-funded Building Health Cities (BHC) project is taking an innovative approach to urban planning. By refocusing city policies, planning, and services with a health equity lens and improving data-driven decision making, BHC is improving the social determinants of health in Smart Cities in India, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Planning for a Smart City is intrinsically linked to health: transportation, the environment, sanitation, education, recreation, technology, and the built environment all influence the health of an urban population. When decision-making across these areas is harmonized, people will benefit from improved access to health services, decreased environmental and lifestyle risk factors for chronic diseases, a lower burden of infectious diseases, and an increased availability of usable data for decision makers related to the social determinants of health (SDH).

The training, and the BHC approach, will focus on supporting improvements for four sustainable development goals; Goals 3 (Good Health & Well Being), 10 (Reducing Inequalities), 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities) and 17 (Partnerships for the Goals). The training will help the trainees acquire the requisite knowledge and skills in order to prepare developmental plans for their cities in a holistic manner under the New Urban Agenda with the principle of 'Health in all policies.'

The first half of this training will describe the theory behind this approach, the current evidence supporting social determinants of health (SDH) approaches in Asia, and the learning gaps that need to be filled in order to scale such an approach. The approach includes six steps, including identifying stakeholders, assessment of health needs, existing data systems and gaps in their access and use, creating demands for healthy built environment and support evidence based decision making by the city authorities. Since our BHC approach is a pilot project, there would be need to evaluate the effectiveness and feasibility for scale up of the project for each city context. Once the participants have understood the approach, they will work in groups in the second half of the training which will be hands-on, and participants will work through the 6 stages of this approach given below using their own countries and sectors as the examples. Participants will then present their mini-cases to the group for feedback and discussion.