Surf Wiki
Save to docs
general/health-promotion

From Surf Wiki (app.surf) — the open knowledge base

Healthy community design

Urban planning to facilitate healthy lifestyles

Urban planning to facilitate healthy lifestyles

Healthy community design is planning and designing communities that make it easier for people to live healthy lives. Healthy community design offers important benefits:

  • Decreases dependence on the automobile by building homes, businesses, schools, churches and parks closer to each other so that people can more easily walk or bike between them.
  • Provides opportunities for people to be physically active and socially engaged as part of their daily routine, improving the physical and mental health of its citizens.
  • Allows persons, if they choose, to age in place and remain all their lives in a community that reflects their changing lifestyles and changing physical capabilities.

Health benefits

Healthy places are those designed and built to improve the quality of life for all people who live, work, learn, and play within their borders—person is free to make choices amid a variety of healthy, available, accessible, and affordable options.

Healthy community design can provide many advantages:

  • Promote physical activity
  • Promote a diet free of additives, preservatives, and pesticides
  • Improve air quality
  • Lower risk of injuries
  • Increase social connection and sense of community
  • Reduce contributions to climate change

Principles

Membrane diagram resembling high traffic street
language=en}}</ref>
  • Encourage mixed land use and greater land density to shorten distances between homes, workplaces, schools and recreation so people can walk or bike more easily to them.
  • Provide good mass transit to reduce the dependence upon automobiles. Build good pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure, including sidewalks and bike paths that are safely removed from automobile traffic as well as good right of way laws and clear, easy-to-follow signage.
  • Ensure affordable housing is available for people of all income levels.
  • Create community centers where people can gather and mingle as part of their daily activities.
  • Offer access to green space and parks.

References

References

  1. (2008). "Healthy Community Design". U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Environmental Health.
  2. (February 2017). "A comprehensive scoring system to measure healthy community design in land use plans and regulations". Preventive Medicine.
  3. (1981). "Livable Streets". University of California Press.
Info: Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

health-promotion urban-design
Want to explore this topic further?

Ask Mako anything about Healthy community design — get instant answers, deeper analysis, and related topics.

Research with Mako

Free with your Surf account

Content sourced from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.

This content may have been generated or modified by AI. CloudSurf Software LLC is not responsible for the accuracy, completeness, or reliability of AI-generated content. Always verify important information from primary sources.

Report