Exploring the role of smart cities in supporting ageing-in-place in Chongqing, China.

OBJECTIVE: Through interviews with older adults and professionals in Chongqing, China, this paper explores the challenges and opportunities faced by smart cities that undertake to better support ageing-in-place. METHODS: We undertook a qualitative multi-methods approach, engaging 46 professional stakeholders and 64 older people to examine the role of smart cities in enabling older people to age-in-place in Chongqing, China. RESULTS: With the development of smart cities, technology has the potential to facilitate ageing-in-place by creating opportunities for heathy and active ageing. This study identified specific priorities in delivering age-friendly smart cities, including the following: shaping smart environments around the everyday lives of older people, designing inclusive and equitable smart cities and ensuring strong forms of institutional governance, trust and relationship building with older people. CONCLUSIONS: The age-friendly city and communities movement (AFCC) and smart city policy instruments have potential for realising active ageing by supporting mobility, access to services and civic participation. However, there exists a disconnect between smart city policy and practice in delivering tangible well-being outcomes for older people. Addressing this requires greater cross-sectoral working, reconciling smart city policy priorities with AFCC domains and creating the institutional and governance framework to enable socially sustainable cities to support ageing-in-place.

How Do Urban Environments Affect Young People's Mental Health? A Novel Conceptual Framework to Bridge Public Health, Planning, and Neurourbanism.

Childhood and adolescence are crucial periods for mental and social development. Currently, mental illness among young people is a global epidemic, and rates of disorders such as depression and anxiety are rising. Urban living, compared with rural living, is linked with a higher risk of serious mental illness, which is important because the world is urbanizing faster than ever before. Urban environments and their landscapes, designs, and features influence mental health and well-being. However, no conceptual frameworks to date have detailed the effect of urban environments on young people's mental health, and few studies have considered the growing role of digital and social media in this relationship, leading to calls for the development of holistic approaches to describe this relationship. This article synthesizes existing knowledge on urban places (both built and natural environments) and mental health in the public health and urban planning literature and examines the emerging field of neurourbanism (a multidisciplinary study of the effect of urban environments on mental health and brain activity) to enhance current practice and research. We developed 2 novel conceptual frameworks (1 research-oriented, 1 practice-oriented), adapted from Bronfenbrenner's socioecological model, that focus on the relationship between urban environments and young people's mental health. We added a digital and social media contextual level to the socioecological model, and we applied a multilayer concept to highlight potential cross-field interactions and collaborations. The proposed frameworks can help to guide future practice and research in this area.

Wind disasters adaptation in cities in a changing climate: A systematic review.

Wind-related disasters will bring more devastating consequences to cities in the future with a changing climate, but relevant studies have so far provided insufficient information to guide adaptation actions. This study aims to provide an in-depth elaboration of the contents discussed in open access literature regarding wind disaster adaptation in cities. We used the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to refine topics and main contents based on 232 publications (1900 to 2019) extracted from Web of Science and Scopus. We conducted a full-text analysis to filter out focal cities along with their adaptation measures. The results show that wind disaster adaptation research in cities has formed a systematic framework in four aspects: 1) vulnerability and resilience of cities, 2) damage evaluation, 3) response and recovery, and 4) health impacts of wind disaster. Climate change is the background for many articles discussing vulnerability and adaptation in coastal areas. It is also embedded in damage evaluation since it has the potential to exacerbate disaster consequences. The literature is strongly inclined towards more developed cities such as New York City and New Orleans, among which New York City associated with Hurricane Sandy ranks first (38/232). Studies on New York City cover all the aspects, including the health impacts of wind disasters which are significantly less studied now. Distinct differences do exist in the number of measures regarding the adaptation categories and their subcategories. We also find that hard adaptation measures (i.e., structural and physical measures) are far more popular than soft adaptation measures (i.e., social and institutional measures). Our findings suggest that policymakers should pay more attention to cities that have experienced major wind disasters other than New York. They should embrace the up-to-date climate change study to defend short-term disasters and take precautions against long-term changes. They should also develop hard-soft hybrid adaptation measures, with special attention on the soft side, and enhance the health impact study of wind-related disasters.

Examining the distributional equity of urban tree canopy cover and ecosystem services across United States cities.

Examining the distributional equity of urban tree canopy cover (UTCC) has increasingly become an important interdisciplinary focus of ecologists and social scientists working within the field of environmental justice. However, while UTCC may serve as a useful proxy for the benefits provided by the urban forest, it is ultimately not a direct measure. In this study, we quantified the monetary value of multiple ecosystem services (ESD) provisioned by urban forests across nine U.S. cities. Next, we examined the distributional equity of UTCC and ESD using a number of commonly investigated socioeconomic variables. Based on trends in the literature, we predicted that UTCC and ESD would be positively associated with the variables median income and percent with an undergraduate degree and negatively associated with the variables percent minority, percent poverty, percent without a high school degree, percent renters, median year home built, and population density. We also predicted that there would be differences in the relationships between each response variable (UTCC and ESD) and the suite of socioeconomic predictor variables examined because of differences in how each response variable is derived. We utilized methods promoted within the environmental justice literature, including a multi-city comparative analysis, the incorporation of high-resolution social and environmental datasets, and the use of spatially explicit models. Patterns between the socioeconomic variables and UTCC and ESD did not consistently support our predictions, highlighting that inequities are generally not universal but rather context dependent. Our results also illustrated that although the variables UTCC and ESD had largely similar relationships with the predictor variables, differences did occur between them. Future distributional equity research should move beyond the use of proxies for environmental amenities when possible while making sure to consider that the use of ecosystem service estimates may result in different patterns with socioeconomic variables of interest. Based on our findings, we conclude that understanding and remedying the challenges associated with inequities requires an understanding of the local social-ecological system if larger sustainability goals are to be achieved.

Citizen Science-Informed Community Master Planning: Land Use and Built Environment Changes to Increase Flood Resilience and Decrease Contaminant Exposure.

Communities adjacent to concentrated areas of industrial land use (CAILU) are exposed to elevated levels of pollutants during flood disasters. Many CAILU are also characterized by insufficient infrastructure, poor environmental quality, and socially vulnerable populations. Manchester, TX is a marginalized CAILU neighborhood proximate to several petrochemical industrial sites that is prone to frequent flooding. Pollutants from stormwater runoff discharge from industrial land uses into residential areas have created increased toxicant exposures. Working with local organizations, centers/institutes, stakeholders, and residents, public health researchers sampled air, water, indoor dust, and outdoor soil while researchers from landscape architecture and urban planning applied these findings to develop a community-scaled master plan. The plan utilizes land use and built environment changes to increase flood resiliency and decrease exposure to contaminants. Using a combination of models to assess the performance, costs, and benefits of green infrastructure and pollutant load impacts, the master plan is projected to capture 147,456 cubic feet of runoff, and create $331,400 of annual green benefits by reducing air pollution and energy use, providing pollution treatment, increase carbon dioxide sequestration, and improve groundwater replenishment. Simultaneously, there is a 41% decrease across all analyzed pollutants, reducing exposure to and transferal of toxic materials.

Community resilience and urban planning in tsunami-prone settlements in Chile.

Urban planning can serve to minimise the effects of a tsunami and enhance community resilience. This study explores to what extent urban planning has addressed tsunami resilience in four villages on Chile's South Pacific coast, each of which was struck by tsunamis in 1960, 2010, and 2015. Through a detailed policy review and semi-structured interviews with residents, this paper analyses whether tsunami mitigation policies were incorporated into regional and local planning tools. It finds that although the government proposed relocation to tsunami-safe areas after the tsunami of 1960, urban development continued mainly in tsunami inundation zones-in the context of weak local planning frameworks and in the absence of community participation. In only one of the four case studies did participatory planning bring about the relocation of an entire village to a safe location. This paper concludes that incorporating participatory risk zone planning into urban planning enhances tsunami resilience.

Healthy urban planning: an institutional policy analysis of strategic planning in Sydney, Australia.

Rapid urbanization requires health promotion practitioners to understand and engage with strategic city planning. This policy analysis research investigated how and why health was taken up into strategic land use planning in Sydney, Australia, between 2013 and 2018. This qualitative study develops two case studies of consecutive instances of strategic planning in Sydney. Data collection was done via in-depth stakeholder interviews (n = 11) and documentary analysis. Data collection and analysis revolved around core categories underpinning policy institutions (actors, structures, ideas, governance and power) to develop an explanatory narrative of the progress of 'health' in policy discourse over the study period. The two strategic planning efforts shifted in policy discourse. In the earlier plan, 'healthy built environments' was positioned as a strategic direction, but without a mandate for action the emphasis was lost in an economic growth agenda. The second effort shifted that agenda to ecological sustainability, a core aspect of which was 'Liveability', having greater potential for health promotion. However, 'health' remained underdeveloped as a core driver for city planning remaining without an institutional mandate. Instead, infrastructure coordination was the defining strategic city problem and this paradigm defaulted to emphasizing 'health precincts' rather than positioning health as core for the city. This research demonstrates the utility in institutional analysis to understanding positioning health promotion in city planning. Despite potential shifts in policy discourse and a more sophisticated approach to planning holistically, the challenge remains of embedding health within the institutional mandates driving city planning.

Resilience actions to counteract the effects of climate change and health emergencies in cities: the role of artificial neural networks.

Both the World Health Organization (WHO) with its 2015 "Climate and Health Country Profile Project" and the Istituto Superiore di Sanità (ISS) with its 2018 "Health and Climate Change", agree on the emergency generated by the climate change and concerning health problems. The mitigation strategy suggested by the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC) against greenhouse gas emissions and their effects on climate change, has not yet yielded the desired results. It is therefore necessary to focus on adaptation strategies, to immediately counter the effects of climate change (CC) on most vulnerable people and environments, by increasing their resilience through local interventions and targeted resilience actions. Coordinated resilience actions are necessary to combat the effects of CC especially in urban areas. Useful tools to manage and optimize resilience actions are artificial neural networks (ANN) in complex and dynamic domains as cities are. The case of ANN applied to a city is presented as an example to increase the climate resilience of health local systems. In the current state of knowledge, ANN prove to be the most advanced and global solution to coordinate and manage a set of resilience actions in urban areas.

Healthy Cities Programme in the Eastern Mediterranean Region: concurrent progress and future prospects.

Urbanization has been rapidly increasing during the past two decades and it is estimated that by 2030, two thirds of the world's population would be living in urban areas, exposing the population to a large number of environmental, social, cultural, economic and behavioural factors that impact population health and wellbeing.In response to such challenges, the Healthy Cities concept was instigated in 1977 that, along with the Alma Ata Declaration and commitment of countries at the Thirtieth World Health Assembly in Geneva, Switzerland, would empower communities to lead socially and economically productive lives. A number of policy documents from the World Health Organization (WHO) and other bodies suggested introducing new approaches to managing cities and addressing health challenges, focusing more on health determinants and prevention than medical interventions.

Evidence-Informed Planning for Healthy Liveable Cities: How Can Policy Frameworks Be Used to Strengthen Research Translation?

PURPOSE OF THE REVIEW: A compelling body of research demonstrates associations between urban design and health, but this research is often not reflected in urban policies. This article reviews the literature on the science and practice of translating health research into urban policy and planning. Two Australian case studies demonstrate how policy frameworks can help guide evidence-based planning for healthy urban environments. RECENT FINDINGS: To influence city planning, health researchers need to undertake policy-relevant research and understand policymaking processes. Policy frameworks can assist researchers to tailor research evidence and research translation strategies to the political and policymaking context. Strong links between urban policymakers and health researchers can help bridge the knowledge-policy divide. Policy frameworks can help researchers to identify and capitalise on windows of opportunity for evidence-based policy change. Doing so increases the likelihood of public health evidence informing urban policies that will create healthy liveable cities.

Effects of Superblocks on health and health inequities: a proposed evaluation framework.

The following essay outlines the intervention and presents a framework that will serve as a guide in the evaluation of the different effects of the Superblocks. Superblocks consist of amalgamations of blocks throughout the city, with the goal of improving the habitability of public spaces, advancing sustainable mobility, increasing urban green, and promoting residents' participation and coresponsibility, while ultimately influencing residents' health and health inequities. The evaluation framework considers the following aspects: the interventions implemented in the Superblock strategy, the changes that occur at neighbourhood and individual level and the population turnover as intermediate factors and finally the health outcomes. Inequity dimensions are also considered.

Analysis of Environmental Issues with an Application of Civil Complaints: The Case of Shiheung City, Republic of Korea.

The aim of this study was to better identify the information generated by citizens and to explore the regional social phenomenon whereby higher quality urban services focused on understanding regional issues are promoted. Citizens voluntarily and continuously communicate with local government both online and offline. We wanted to determine how civic information can be applied to urban planning. We selected Shiheung City, Republic of Korea, as our study area, as the city is formed of various types of land use: industrial areas, agricultural land, and residential areas. This area is facing developmental pressure with released development-restricted areas, and has been environmentally damaged by industrial complexes. We conducted a semantic network analysis of the top 10% most commonly used nouns in civil complaints to determine the keywords. Each thematic map we created was based on geographical information to explain the temporary, continuous, and chronic issues. The chronic problems were discussed in relation to the regional development process. The process of identifying and analyzing local issues by analyzing information voluntarily provided by citizens plays an important role in government-led urban management planning and policy formation and can contribute to decision making in the development of future urban policies.

Physical Activity and Social Behaviors of Urban Children in Green Playgrounds.

INTRODUCTION: Nature exposure is associated with many wellbeing benefits. However, the influence of green space on the physical activity and social behaviors of children is not completely understood. The purpose of the study was to complete a stepwise impact evaluation of a large-scale playground greening project at a Title 1 elementary school in Los Angeles, California. METHODS: Physical activity and social interaction data were collected with direct observation and accelerometers pre-, immediately post-, and 4 months post-greening at control (students enrolled=393) and experimental (students enrolled=538) locations from 2016 to 2017. Effects of relevant variables on recess behavior were analyzed with linear mixed models in 2018. RESULTS: Zone popularity and recess behaviors did not change for control students during the study (p>0.05). Areas replaced by green space became the most popular for experimental students who transitioned from traditional playground games/sports to tag/chasing, gymnastics, climbing/jumping, and creative play. The percentage of students observed as sedentary decreased by 10.0% (95% CI=4.9%, 15.0%) at 4 months, p=0.003. Vigorous activity participation increased pre to post at the individual (48.5%, 95% CI=29.1%, 67.9%, p<0.001) and population level (41.2%, 95% CI=27.3%, 55.1%, p=0.003) and remained higher than pre-greening at 4 months (p<0.05) for girls in the experimental group only. The moderate to vigorous physical activity differential between green space and hardscape was greater for fifth graders than all other grades, p=0.002. Student physical and verbal conflict rates decreased below pre-greening rates after 4 months for the experimental group, p<0.001. CONCLUSIONS: Results suggest that adding green space to asphalt-covered schoolyards helps expose children to nature, increases daily activity levels, and promotes social wellbeing in sex- and age-dependent ways.

Rethinking safety in numbers: are intersections with more crossing pedestrians really safer?

OBJECTIVE: To advance the interpretation of the 'safety in numbers' effect by addressing the following three questions. How should the safety of pedestrians be measured, as the safety of individual pedestrians or as the overall safety of road facilities for pedestrians? Would intersections with large numbers of pedestrians exhibit a favourable safety performance? Would encouraging people to walk be a sound safety countermeasure? METHODS: We selected 288 signalised intersections with 1003 pedestrian crashes in Hong Kong from 2010 to 2012. We developed a Bayesian Poisson-lognormal model to calculate two common indicators related to pedestrian safety: the expected crash rate per million crossing pedestrians and the expected excess crash frequency. The ranking results of these two indicators for the selected intersections were compared. RESULTS: We confirmed a significant positive association between pedestrian volumes and pedestrian crashes, with an estimated coefficient of 0.21. Although people who crossed at intersections with higher pedestrian volumes experienced a relatively lower crash risk, these intersections may still have substantial potential for crash reduction. CONCLUSIONS: Conclusions on the safety in numbers effect based on a cross-sectional analysis should be reached with great caution. The safety of individual pedestrians can be measured based on the crash risk, whereas the safety of road facilities for pedestrians should be determined by the environmental hazards of walking. Intersections prevalent of pedestrians do not always exhibit favourable safety performance. Relative to increasing the number of pedestrians, safety strategies should focus on reducing environmental hazards and removing barriers to walking.

Supporting Active Living Through Community Plans: The Association of Planning Documents With Design Standards and Features.

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to examine the association between the presence of supportive community planning documents in US municipalities with design standards and requirements supportive of active living. DESIGN: Cross-sectional study using data from the 2014 National Survey of Community-Based Policy and Environmental Supports for Healthy Eating and Active Living. SETTING: Nationally representative sample of US municipalities. PARTICIPANTS: Respondents are 2005 local officials. MEASURES: Assessed: (1) The presence of design standards and feature requirements and (2) the association between planning documents and design standards and feature requirements supportive of active living in policies for development. ANALYSIS: Using logistic regression, significant trends were identified in the presence of design standards and feature requirements by plan and number of supportive objectives present. RESULTS: Prevalence of design standards ranged from 19% (developer dedicated right-of-way for bicycle infrastructure development) to 50% (traffic-calming features in areas with high pedestrian and bicycle volume). Features required in policies for development ranged from 14% (short/medium pedestrian-scale block sizes) to 44% (minimum sidewalk widths of 5 feet) of municipalities. As the number of objectives in municipal plans increased, there was a significant and positive trend ( P < .05) in the prevalence of each design standard and requirement. CONCLUSIONS: Municipal planning documents containing objectives supportive of physical activity are associated with design standards and feature requirements supportive of activity-friendly communities.

Network influences on the development and implementation of active transportation policies in six U.S. cities.

Many communities have prioritized policy and built environment changes to promote active transportation (AT). However, limited information exists on the partnerships and processes necessary to develop and implement such policy and environmental changes, particularly among organizations in non-health sectors. Within the transportation sector, metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) are increasingly recognized as organizations that can support AT policies. This study examined inter-organizational relationships among MPOs and their partners working to advance AT policies in six U.S. cities. In fall 2015, an average of 22 organizations in each city participated in an online survey about partnerships with MPOs and other organizations developing and implementing AT policies. Measures included organizational characteristics and relational attributes including: level of AT policy collaboration, information transmission, resource sharing, and perceived decisional power. Descriptive network analysis and exponential random graph modeling were used to examine organizational attributes and relational predictors associated with inter-organizational collaboration in each network. MPOs served as collaborative intermediaries, connecting other organizations around AT policies, in half of the cities examined. Organizations in each city were more likely to collaborate around AT policies when partners communicated at least quarterly. In half of the cities, the probability of AT policy collaboration was higher when two agencies exchanged resources and when organizations had perceived decisional authority. Network analysis helped identify factors likely to improve partnerships around AT policies. Results may contribute to best practices for collaboration among researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and advocates across diverse sectors seeking to promote population-level physical activity.

Building Healthy Community Environments: A Public Health Approach.

Environmental quality has a profound effect on health and the burden of disease. In the United States, the environment-related burden of disease is increasingly dominated by chronic diseases. At the local level, public health practitioners realize that many policy decisions affecting environmental quality and health transcend the authorities of traditional health department programs. Healthy decisions about the built environment, including housing, transportation, and energy, require broad collaborative efforts. Environmental health professionals have an opportunity to address the shift in public health burden toward chronic diseases and play an important role in the design of healthy communities by bringing data and tools to decision makers. This article provides a guide for community leaders to consider the public health effects of decisions about the built environment. We present a conceptual framework that represents a shift from compartmentalized solutions toward an inclusive systems approach that encourages partnership across disciplines and sectors. We discuss practical tools to assist with environmental decision making, such as Health Impact Assessments, environmental public health tracking, and cumulative risk assessment. We also identify priorities in research, practice, and education to advance the role of public health in decision making to improve health, such as the Health Impact Assessment, as a core competency for environmental health practitioners. We encourage cross-disciplinary communication, research, and education that bring the fields of planning, transportation, and energy in closer collaboration with public health to jointly advance the systems approach to today's environmental challenges.

Current Status and Policy Planning for Promoting Age-Friendly Cities in Taitung County: Dialogue Between Older Adults and Service Providers.

The World Health Organization has promoted age-friendly city (AFC) projects in response to the aging population. Taiwan has also promoted AFC policies. This study was conducted in Taitung County, where 15.37% of the population is older adults in Taiwan. The aim was to understand the perceptions of older adults and service providers with regard to the current status of AFC policies to influence future policies. The participants of this study were older adults and service providers in various regions of Taitung. Quantitative questionnaires were completed by older adults and qualitative interviews were held with focus groups. The older adults were the most satisfied with the AFC domains of "respect and social inclusion" and "community and health services", and the least satisfied with "transportation" and "civic participation and employment". Homogeneity existed between the older adults' satisfaction levels in different regions and the service providers' opinions; however, there were notable differences between them. Both economic development and the ethnicity of groups in different regions are influential factors that determine the success of government policies. In promoting AFC policies, local governments should consider their applicability based on local conditions and resources to meet the needs of the aging population in rural areas.