Speakers
Description
Starting with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the global agenda has increasingly emphasized the critical intersection of urban planning and public health. Though, the principles of healthy living and enhancing quality of life have always been embedded in urban planning and design goals, aligning with Sustainable Development Goals particularly related to Good Health & Well-being and Sustainable Cities & Communities, the quest for further professional and conceptual implications requires innovative and transformative action to seek evidence and inform the urban planning policies and programs. For this reason, opening a collaborative perspective and exploring healthy cities’-built environment characteristics (BE) for a sustainable urban future. Advances in digital technologies, including spatial data, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and digital geo-platforms, have significantly expanded the potentials of urban e-planning, transforming how spatial and health data are integrated across multiple scales.
This presentation highlights integrating urban e-planning principles and spatial data to identify and enhance BE features that promote healthy living from multiple scales and perspectives. It emphasizes the creation of physically active, socially connected, and vibrant communities while advancing urban health measures and informing evidence-based policymaking. Our ultimate aim is to contribute to the literature on building sustainable, health-supportive urban communities in the context of rapid urbanization coinciding with technological and environmental challenges.
This presentation is based on the research conducted between 2019-2023 as part of a Tubitak funded project, investigating the relationships between the BE and chronic disease prevalence in Türkiye and Ankara. We examine prevalences across cities and regions, and analyze their spatial distribution patterns with cities' socioeconomic and geographical characteristics. The findings are presented to address three major challenges, drawing on the examples at the intersection of spatial and health data by utilizing urban e-planning tools. These challenges refer to climate change and health; equitable health infrastructure access; and built environment planning and design. By incorporating a variety of spatial data, such as Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Corine database, etc. we identify factors influencing health status of cities. Clustering algorithms and ranking were used to specify place affiliations and compare them with disease prevalence. The findings are used to construct a health atlas and identify spatial inequalities and city deprivations.
The capacities of urban e-planning tools are useful for many purposes. This presentation offers a perspective for merging spatial methods with new narratives based on what we learned from our project. The findings support an emerging area of research in interpreting spatial data and applying various methodological tools to develop new narratives and urban policies for transforming cities and communities.
| Keywords | e-planning; healthy cities; climate change; health infrastructure access; built environment |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
