Towards healthy urbanism: inclusive, equitable and sustainable (THRIVES) – an urban design and planning framework from theory to praxis

Abstract

The globally distributed health impacts of environmental degradation and widening population inequalities require a fundamental shift in understandings of healthy urbanismincluding policies and decisions that shape neighbourhood and building design. The built environment tends to disadvantage or exclude women, children, the elderly, disabled, poor and other groups, starting from design and planning stages through to occupation, and this results in avoidable health impacts. Although these concepts are not new, they are rapidly emerging as built environment research and practice priorities without clear understanding of the interconnected aims of healthy environments that are sustainable, equitable and inclusive. This article promotes a new framework -Towards Healthy uRbanism: InclusiVe Equitable Sustainable (THRIVES)that extends previous conceptualisations and reorients focus towards the existential threat of environmental breakdown and the social injustice created through inequitable and exclusive urban governance and design processes and outcomes. The Framework was developed through synthesising knowledge from research and practice, and by testing this new conceptualisation in a participatory workshop. Ongoing research is exploring implementation of the Framework in practice. If widely adopted, this Framework may contribute towards achieving the goals of sustainable development through a focus on increasing human health and wellbeing in urban development.

Understanding the Role of Standards in the Negotiation of a Healthy Built Environment

“…As outlined by Pineo [ 68 ], the recent COVID-19 outbreak has further highlighted the importance of addressing planetary health, where studies report how rapid unplanned urbanisation (amongst other factors, such as intensive farming) has been associated with increased pressure on ecosystems and wildlife, raising zoonotic and anthropocentric disease risk [ 78 ]. This underscores the importance of promoting ecological enhancement through built environment projects to reduce long-term health risks associated with ecological decline.…”

“…Our review and comparison activities focused on standards that were most frequently referred to by interview participants, listed in Table 1 . The substantive scope of the standards was contrasted against the Towards Healthy Urbanism: Inclusive, Equitable, Sustainable (THRIVES) framework which collates a range of health and wellbeing intentions that can be promoted through BE projects [ 68 , 69 ]. The THRIVES framework offers a holistic framework through which to examine the scope of standards and the health and wellbeing intentions they seek to address.…”

Work in and for a Healthy City

“…working), and built environment (buildings, places and spaces where activities happen). A recent framework (THRIVES) stresses the need to reframe the concept of healthy urban development “to encompass the connected lenses of sustainability, equity and inclusion and the consideration of health impacts at multiple spatial and temporal dimensions” (Pineo 2020 , p. 1). While this framework does not elaborate on work, these core principles reinforce its relevance, especially regarding the health consequences of environmental breakdown (e.g.…”

Built environment stakeholders’ experiences of implementing healthy urban development: an exploratory study

“…The social and environmental determinants of health have been integrated with wider sustainable development priorities through the work of UN Habitat and others, exemplified by the Sustainable Development Goals' explicit links between health and the environment (UN General Assembly 2015). As argued by Pineo (2020), an important driver for healthy property development relates to the framing of health and sustainability as overlapping goals by industry bodies such as the World Green Building Council (WGBC 2013(WGBC , 2014(WGBC , 2016 and Urban Land Institute (Kramer et al 2014, ULI 2015, Hammerschmidt et al 2016. This section briefly describes the policy and practice context for healthy urbanism in countries explored within this study.…”

“…accessible open space and affordable housing). Pineo (2020) reviewed 15 healthy urban design and planning guidance documents and argued that many perpetuated a narrow model of health, one which emphasises supporting 'healthy lifestyle choices' (e.g. physical activity and diet) rather than recognising structural barriers to health and the urgent risks of environmental degradation.…”