Shaping Neighbourhoods

For Local Health and Global Sustainability

Hugh Barton, Marcus Grant, Richard Guise

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367336929, 9780367336912
• eBook ISBN: 9781000403817
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture générale

Shaping Neighbourhoods is unique in combining all aspects of the spatial planning of neighbourhoods and towns whilst emphasising positive outcomes for people's health and global sustainability. This new edition retains the combination of radicalism, evidence-based advice and pragmatism that made earlier editions so popular.

This updated edition strengthens guidance in relation to climate change and biodiversity, tackling crises of population health that are pushing up health-care budgets, but have elements of their origins in poor place spatial planning – such as isolation, lack of everyday physical activity, and respiratory problems. It is underpinned by new research into how people use their localities, and the best way to achieve inclusive, healthy, low-carbon settlements.

The guide can assist with:

• Understanding the principles for planning healthy and sustainable neighbourhoods and towns

• Planning collaborative and inclusive processes for multi-sectoral working

• Developing know-how and skills in matching local need with urban form

• Discovering new ways to integrate development with natural systems

• Designing places with character and recognising good urban form

Whether you are a student faced with a local planning project; a public health professional, planner, urban designer or developer involved in new development or regeneration; a council concerned with promoting healthy and sustainable environments; or a community group wanting to improve your neighbourhood – you will find help here.

chapter 1
orientation and principles

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Local global planning

1.2 Neighbourhoods for real

1.3 Powers, professions and processes

POLICIES AND AGENDAS

1.4 Sustainable development

1.5 Health and wellbeing

1.6 Health and place equity

1.7 Climate emergency

1.8 Ecological crisis

1.9 Spatial planning at the crossroads

THE NEIGHBOURHOOD AS HABITAT

1.10 The ecosystem approach

1.11 The Settlement Health Map

1.12 The natural human habitat

THE NEIGHBOURHOOD IN FOCUS

1.13 Defining neighbourhoods

1.14 Town, neighbourhood, homezone

1.15 Neighbourhood design principles

CASE STUDIES

1.a Three neighbourhoods in Algiers, Algeria

1.b Polimipara, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

1.c Hammarby Sjöstad, Stockholm, Sweden

1.d Utrecht, the Netherlands

introduction

1.1 LOCAL GLOBAL PLANNING

MANIFESTO

Neighbourhoods are the localities in which people live. They imply a sense of belonging and community, grounding our lives in a specific place we call home. They are the building blocks of towns and cities. Aspirations for neighbourhoods are surprisingly consistent among people with very different backgrounds. We want neighbourhoods that are attractive, safe, healthy and unpolluted, with high-quality local facilities, access to green spaces, and excellent connections to other areas. We would like the opportunity for convivial social activity and friendship. There is recognition that how we live locally must work in harmony with nature, with the flow of natural cycles and with global ecology. Neighbourhoods sit in the front line of actions to support healthier lives and more sustainable lifestyles. They should be planned so as to:

• ◆ provide a healthy local human habitat
• ◆ enable all people to flourish physically, mentally and socially
• ◆ enhance local and global biodiversity and natural assets
• ◆ work towards net carbon neutrality

The challenge

Society shapes neighbourhoods and neighbourhoods shape people’s lives. The long-term trend has been the progressive decline in significance and quality of neighbourhoods, as economic globalisation, technological innovation, and urban change have altered people’s behaviour. The choices we are making, corporately or individually, are in turn threatening personal and planetary health. On the one hand there are increasing problems of obesity, mental illness, social exclusion and inequality; on the other hand, unsustainable greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity loss.

We see that microcosm and macrocosm are interdependent. Individual lifestyle and wellbeing are connected to earth ecology. Spatial planning, in particular the integrated planning of neighbourhoods and towns, plays a critical role in the chain connecting the personal to the global. Decisions about the physical development and renewal of localities – housing, workspace, transport, facilities, greenspace – can go either way, compounding the problems or creating healthy, convivial, low-carbon neighbourhoods. This book offers the insight, knowledge and skills to enable the latter to happen: local global planning.

The role of this guide

This guide is designed to bridge the gap between rhetoric and action, between research and policy; between social, economic and environmental priorities.

It adopts a radical and challenging stance, offering evidence, effective policies, spatial strategies and design solutions that work towards healthy, inclusive, sustainable and net-zero carbon communities.

It recognises that neighbourhood initiatives may stem from civil society, private investors and/or the local authority, and the key is to find ways to work together.

The guide is concerned with reality, not vain hopes. It is about socially and economically feasible policies for everyday towns and urban neighbourhoods.

GOALS FOR THE LOCAL HUMAN HABITAT

This guide is about enhancing the quality of neighbourhoods as places to live, work and play. It advocates an inclusive, environmentally responsible model of neighbourhoods. There are three overarching goals:

Health and quality of life for all

Following the World Health Organization (WHO) lead, we define health as a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely absence of disease or infirmity (WHO Charter 1946). The physical environment of neighbourhoods affects health and wellbeing both directly, through the quality of housing, facilities and public space, and indirectly, through impact on behaviour and the sense of community. A key theme is the degree to which neighbourhoods provide for all groups – young and old, rich and poor, whatever their ethnicity or abilities.

Environmental sustainability

The ecological footprint of settlements in terms of resource use and pollution is great, continues to grow in many respects, and ought to be greatly diminished. Central to this agenda are the interlinked emergencies of climate change, with the need to achieve net carbon neutrality, and the loss of habitat, species and biological diversity across the globe. Planning sustainable neighbourhoods means reworking the development conventions of the recent past. We advocate local neighbourhoods taking greater responsibility for the health of the global commons – climate, land, water, biodiversity.

The design of a place enables people to start living in new ways: car-free street in Freiburg, Germany.

Economic and civic vitality

Localities should not be mere dormitories. Their rejuvenation as healthy, thriving and sustainable neighbourhoods can only be achieved if there is both local dynamism and appropriate spatial policy context. Part of the local energy comes from the vitality of the local businesses and services, investing in people and places; part comes from political commitment, plus effective partnerships between community, voluntary, public and private sectors.

HEALTH AS THE PULSE AND HEART OF PLANNING

If there is one over-riding hope for the guide, it is to enable planners, designers, politicians and developers, who are making decisions about the urban environment, to see clearly how to put the long-term health and wellbeing of people first. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic there is recognition that public health is a huge motivator for political, business and public action. For the future it should be the motivation for creating and sustaining towns and cities that provide high quality of life for all.

The WHO Healthy Cities network has been promoting this idea since 1990, pointing out that good health is not primarily about illness services (such as the NHS in Britain) but about healthy environment, healthy work, equitable access to housing and services, long-term climate and ecological sustainability. Public health professionals – who take centre stage during pandemics – should now focus their minds on the continuing human need for healthy environments. This should be the starting point for urban planning and design, re-energising the alliance of planning and public health from the beginning of the twentieth century, when the dire effects of poor environments on health were all too evident. The subsequent severance of built environment professions from health, and from each other, due to the creation of legal, institutional and professional silos, can be healed.

Cas...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• The authors
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword to the third edition
• Forewords to previous editions
• Preface
• How to use this guide
• Chapter 1 Orientation and Principles
• Chapter 2 A Neighbourhood Planning Process
• Chapter 3 Providing for Local Need
• Chapter 4 Working with Natural Systems
• Chapter 5 Neighbourhood Strategy
• Chapter 6 Neighbourhood Design and Placemaking
• Bibliography
• Index and key terms