Insights for Healthy Town Design

Between 30th November to 3 December 2020 the Towns Fund Delivery Partner Health and Wellbeing Topic Expert, Katie Wood attended the Healthy City Design Conference, which is conference drawing together the latest thinking on designing health into the urban environment. Katie chaired a session on healthy placemaking and has written a blog with some insights from the conference relevant to the Towns Fund programme.

Key speakers

Social justice and health equity

Addressing equity should be a key consideration for all projects within Town business cases

Sir Michael Marmot addressed this in an inspirational keynote presentation, encouraging decision makers to not just “build back better” but to “build back fairer”. He explained that in England public expenditure as a proportion of GDP went from 42% in 2009 –10 to 35% a decade later and was inequitably distributed. He set out how more deprived areas are more likely to have adverse environmental conditions (such as air pollution) in comparison to less deprived areas.

Designing safe and sustainable health systems

Towns should consider the potential of the NHS as a partner that could generate wider health and wellbeing benefits.

Dr David Pencheon (Director of the NHS Sustainable Development Unit) stated that health systems should start to make a wider contribution to a safe, sustainable, resilient and fair future and that NHS anchor organisations should recognise their vital role in the community.

Health homes and sustainable places

Town projects including new housing provide a key opportunity to support good health and wellbeing – but so does any urban infrastructure.

Fiona Howie (Chief Executive of the Town and Country Planning Association) highlighted the links between housing and health, alongside the need to unite planning and public health professionals. She added that more focus is required on the needs of those with the poorest health and greatest needs to reduce health inequalities. She explained that whilst sports facilities and cycle routes are important, they won’t necessarily be used by those with the poorest health. Instead simple urban infrastructure such as benches can be used to support people who need to rest whilst getting active.

More information on each of these areas can be found at this link.

Selected concepts and case studies

The conference included many interesting case studies which may be of interest to Towns to explore further. These demonstrate how health and wellbeing can be implemented from small scale in the urban environment through how people are connecting to their wider community.

Small Green Spaces - Energy Garden facilitate projects demonstrating the value of small green spaces in the urban environment. They have helped community groups to create gardens on London overground stations and have shown through research studies the benefits both to those involved in creating the gardens and to commuters experiencing them.
Integrated community or 15/20 minute neighbourhood – brings together the built environment, housing, services and amenities. How Melbourne have implemented the 20-minute neighbourhood into their masterplanning is a great case study of this concept.
Get Set Leeds – this programme aims to make Leeds the most active city in England and is taking a collaborative and whole system approach. Findings so far indicate that the biggest barriers to people being active are their environment, but that small changes can make a big difference.
Livewell Accreditation Scheme - The scheme in Chelmsford encourages housing developers to promote the physical and mental health of residents when designing and building new developments.

Key Resources for Towns

Findings from the NHS Healthy New Towns programme have now been developed into a series of guides called Putting Health into Place. Implementation themes are grouped under:

Create compact neighbourhoods
Maximise active travel
Inspire and enable healthy eating
Foster health in homes and buildings
Enable healthy play and leisure

Public Health England have published a guide to integrating health and wellbeing into local planning practice. Based on evidence from pilot projects, the publication has two aims, the first is to facilitate the use of health evidence by directly engaging with local and regional policy makers and practitioners. The second is to provide evidence-informed resources to assist local areas, to develop local spatial planning policies and practices which can improve health and wellbeing for their communities.