Preventive urbanism. The role of health in designing active cities

“We must integrate our concepts of ‘publichealth issues’ with ‘urban planning issues’.Urban planners, engineers, and architectsmust begin to see that they have a criticalrole in public health. Similarly, public healthprofessionals need to appreciate that thebuilt environment influences public health asmuch as vaccines or water quality.”
Richard J. Jackson, Chris Kochtitzky

“Our bodies are designed to move. Ourcities should be too.”
©Nike Inc.

This essay explores the broad and fast-developing field of the socalled Healthy, Active City and shifts the theoretical point of view from a medical, almost curative, issue to an urban one. Urbanism is therefore affirmed as a fundamental and preventive discipline, capable of enhancing the health and quality of life of urban populations.Especially in times of a global pandemic such as the one that beganin early 2020, the relationships between urbanism, urban health,and the built environment are of fundamental importance.
The author tackles, from an urban design and planning perspective,the complex connections and cause-effect processes that link thecharacteristics of our cities to the well-being of populations, focusing on the dichotomy between urban and human bodies, with specific emphasis on physical activity because of its role as a principal contributor to health conditions. For a long time, such relationships were predominantly approached from an epidemiological and so-cial point of view, which saw the features and structure of the cityas the determinants of the levels of health and physical activity; yetthese were rarely investigated in depth. Since the industrial revolution of the mid-nineteenth century, when urbanism as a modern discipline was born, the sanitation issues of the contemporary cityhave greatly changed, as have the socio-demographic structures andpeople’s needs.
Nowadays, health and the practice of physical activity must be seenas relevant goals to be achieved also through comprehensive andintegrated interventions in the physical environment, where communities live and develop, addressing through urban policies and programs, and from a design perspective, the problem of urban living in terms of sustainability, safety, accessibility, and attractiveness.