CIAO DATE: 12/2011
June 2011
The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
Urban health tends to be perceived as measures ensuring access to fresh food, parks, sidewalks and good air quality. In the last decade, donors such as The California Endowment have initiated place-based plans to “build healthy communities” through participatory action planning1. While these endeavors are steps in the right direction, the overall approach to healthy urban development tends to narrowly focus on the physical and built environment, and does not pay adequate attention to the social determinants of health, or what the World Health Organization calls “causes behind the causes” of health (WHO 2008). In part, the challenge lies in the difficulty of understanding the complexity of social reality and the diverse social constructions of health and poverty that exist in multi-cultural cities throughout the world. To control for such complexity, planners tend to favor quantitative, standardized approaches to research whereby they can generalize impacts and solutions to a wider population.
Resource link: Bridging the Gap in Urban Health and Poverty Research [PDF] - 177K