Digitally supported participation in the nexus between public health and urban planning

The nexus between urban planning and public health acknowledges the importance of creating cities that contribute to their residents' physical, mental, and social well-being. The Healthy Cities movement underlines that community participation and intersectoral work are important to create sustainable, equitable, and healthy cities.Several theoretical and practical participatory approaches form the foundation for participation in public health and urban planning. Growing digitalization has significantly transformed how participation is conducted in various fields. Digital technologies not only play a large role in daily life, but they have opened more opportunities for individuals to interact, share, and collaborate in the planning and design of cities.This article explores how digital technologies enable participation among residents and stakeholders in order to support the health-oriented planning of cities and neighborhoods. From the selective case studies presented in the paper, it can be ascertained that digital technologies can support various forms of participation by enabling different levels of engagement as well as both one-way and two-way interactions. Some forms of engagement can be supported entirely within digital platforms. However, in the case of higher engagement, which requires deeper insights into the problems and the codevelopment of solutions, other nondigital formats and traditional methods such as follow-up workshops and focus group discussions are necessary to complement the digital form of participation.

Supporting a Healthy Planet, Healthy People and Health Equity through Urban and Territorial Planning

The form of human settlements impacts on planetary health, population health and health equity. Yet goals for urban and territorial planning are only tangentially linked to public health outcomes. The WHO and UN-Habitat support actions to bring health to the fore in planning and design of human settlements, recently publishing 'Integrating Health in Urban and Territorial Planning: a sourcebook' focusing on 'why' action is needed, 'how' to initiate it; and curating several existing resources on 'what' to do. Recommendations for research, policy and practice include calls for rapid development of closer relationships between public health and spatial planning.

Protocol for a meta-narrative review on research paradigms addressing the urban built environment and human health

BACKGROUND

Urban health is a field of research and practice that has attracted the interest of various disciplines. While it is encouraged for diverse disciplines to contribute to a multidisciplinary field of study such as urban health, this often results in tensions, conflicts or competition between the different traditions that stem from different epistemological backgrounds. This meta-narrative review aims to identify and describe the multiple paradigms and articulate the underlying epistemological, ontological, methodological, and aetiological differences in their approaches. Articulating the paradigms not only contributes to the advancement of research, but also provides a framework for understanding the different policy beliefs and ideas policy actors hold and apply in the policy process.

METHODS

We apply the meta-narrative method to systematic literature review which includes the following six iterative phases. The planning phase includes the finalisation of the review protocol and assembly of review team. The search phase includes a comprehensive literature search in key databases and a double-sided systematic snowballing method. We will search multidisciplinary databases including Web of Science, Scopus and ProQuest, and topic-specific databases including Urban Studies Abstracts (EBSCO), MEDLINE, and EMBASE from their inception onwards. Bibliometric analyses of this literature will be used to triangulate the mapping of the paradigms. The mapping phase includes identifying the dominant paradigms and landmark publications through agreement with the review team. In the appraisal phase, the literature will be assessed by their respective quality standards, followed by data extraction to identify the individual narratives in the conceptual, theoretical, methodological, and instrumental dimensions of each paradigm. The synthesis phase will review the data to compare and contrast and identify the overarching meta-narratives. The recommendation phase will include dissemination of the findings from the review.

DISCUSSION

The meta-narrative review will reveal the how the different paradigms conceptualise, frame and prioritise urban health issues, their preferred methodologies to study the phenomenon, and the nature of the solutions to improve human health. This review will assist researchers and practitioners in understanding and interpreting evidence produced by other traditions that study urban health. Through this, urban health researchers and practitioners will be able to seek coherence in understanding, explaining, and exploring the urban health phenomenon.

SYSTEMATIC REVIEW REGISTRATION

Open Science Framework ( https://osf/io/tn8vk ).