Healthy Cities: Health depends 75% on living environment

Health depends 75% on the environment in which people live.

Report informs that Sebastiaan Van Herk, founder of Healthy Cities, said this at an event titled "Azerbaijan: The Pulse of Healthy Homes," held as part of the 13th session of the World Urban Forum (WUF13) in Baku.

"Housing conditions are very important and are a tool for health. I previously worked in the fields of water and climate. We were implementing major investment programs. We saw that the biggest impact was actually on health. So we thought: why not build the city directly for health, right?

"So, starting from there, how does housing fit into this? We have a tool called the Healthy City Generator. Through this tool, we record all urban determinants and how they affect health. Housing conditions are one of them, while others include mobility, greening and so on. Thus, we can actually calculate the impact of each factor on health.

"And this is very important, because when cities approach us, they often know that health is important and that urban planning and housing conditions matter for health, but they do not fully know what to do or how to act - they mainly want to take action. We kind of bridge that gap between what they know and real action," he said.

According to the guest, when an area, urban zone or city is assessed, its level of healthiness is examined: "We show exactly where they need to focus. We can also assess urban planning projects and see which ones will have the highest positive impact on health.

"To give an example of this, I would like to thank the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat), because we have done a lot of work in Europe for 50 to 100 cities. We had not fully tested this in other cities, and they said: ‘What you are doing is unique, please test it in the Global South as well."

"So we implemented a program together and went to cities in Africa, Asia, South America and elsewhere. We saw that applying this approach, which also includes housing, is extremely relevant there as well. We therefore improved our methodology by adding elements such as informal settlements, safety and other related issues so that they are also taken into account. I thank UN-Habitat for this."