Planning Healthy Cities in China

The Center for the Study of Contemporary China in partnership with PennIUR hosted a seminar titled ‘Planning Healthy Cities in China’. The seminar was given by Professor Lan Wang who is the founder and head of the Healthy City Lab and Dean of the College of Architecture and Urban Planning at Tongji University, Shanghai, China. The presentation was based on research from the Healthy City Lab, which looks at the how the urban built environment affects public health and aims to promote evidence-based practices for healthy city planning.

Professor Wang began the seminar by defining the phrase ‘healthy city’, i.e. one that continually creates and improves its physical and social environments to expand access to community resources that enable people to mutually support each other and perform all the functions of life and development to their maximum potential. The talk approached healthy city planning through the lens of public health, focusing on three different aspects of healthy city planning— science, planning, and governance. 

The science of healthy city planning is founded on theoretical and empirical research. Currently, the Healthy City Lab is working on two research projects. The first is about the relationship between urban development and public health, and focuses on measuring the cognitive health of elderly adults in 15 minute walkable neighborhoods in the Jingan District of Shanghai. The second is about Emergency Medical Services in urban settings and measures ambulance response times. Planning is another component of healthy cities, and the Healthy City Lab approaches this through evidence-based practices for health planning. The primary goal is to understand the complex mechanisms through which built environments affect health, and identify the core planning principles and indicators that significantly impact health. The third factor that was discussed was governance, which the lab addressed through designing and developing standards and assessment tools that can be implemented in cities.  

Professor Wang concluded with a small discussion about the various opportunities that Healthy City planning offers to those who are interested, from policy implementation to teaching and interdisciplinary research. The presentation emphasized the links between public health, governance, and policy and how these important connections influence the development of a healthy city. 

Written by Sowmya Vaidyanathan, Program Assistant