Designing for Health & Wellbeing: Home, City, Society

Rapid urbanization represents major threats and challenges to personal and public health. The World Health Organisation identifies the ‘urban health threat’ as three-fold: infectious diseases, non-communicable diseases; and violence and injury from, amongst other things, road traffic. Within this tripartite structure of health issues in the built environment, there are multiple individual issues affecting both the developed and the developing worlds and the global north and south.

Reflecting on a broad set of interrelated concerns about health and the design of the places we inhabit, this book seeks to better understand the interconnectedness and potential solutions to the problems associated with health and the built environment. Divided into three key themes: home, city, and society, each section presents a number of research chapters that explore global processes, transformative praxis and emergent trends in architecture, urban design and healthy city research. Drawing together practicing architects, academics, scholars, public health professional and activists from around the world to provide perspectives on design for health, this book includes emerging research on: healthy homes, walkable cities, design for ageing, dementia and the built environment, health equality and urban poverty, community health services, neighbourhood support and wellbeing, urban sanitation and communicable disease, the role of transport infrastructures and government policy, and the cost implications of ‘unhealthy’ cities etc. To that end, this book examines alternative and radical ways of practicing architecture and the re-imagining of the profession of architecture through a lens of human health.

List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Contributors
Acronyms

Introduction
Louis Rice, University of the West of England
Matthew Jones, Birmingham City University

Part 1: Home

Chapter 1 For a Walk With… dementia, residential care and redevelopment
Anton Kats

Chapter 2 Health cost benefits of energy upgrades in France
Veronique Ezratty, Service des Etudes Médicales d’EDF (SEM), France
David Ormandy, Warwick Medical School, University of Warwick, UK
Marie-Helene Laurent, EDF R&D, Département TREE, Les Renardières, France
Anne Duburcq, Cemka, France
Fabienne Boutiere, EDF R&D, Département TREE, Les Renardières, France
Laurène Courouve, Cemka, France
Pierre-Andre Cabanes, Service des Etudes Médicales d’EDF (SEM), France

Chapter 3 The Australian dream or a roof over my head. An ecological view of housing for an ageing Australian population
Matthew Hutchinson, Queensland University of Technology, Australia

Chapter 4 Integrating health equity into housing in African cities: case studies from Lagos and Maputo
Ebele R.I. Mogo, McGill University, Canada; Engage Africa Foundation
Jørgen Eskemose Andersen, School of Architecture, Denmark

Part 2: City
Chapter 5 Nudging towards urban walkability in a car-dependent New Zealand neighbourhood
Sam Kebbell, Victoria University of Wellington, NZ; KebbellDaish Architects, NZ
Jenny Ombler, University of Otago, Wellington, NZ

Chapter 6 Reality unraveled through camera lenses: environment as a key issue surrounding infant mortality in Saint Louis City
Vindhya Kakarla, Saint Louis University, USA
Anne Niyigena, Saint Louis University, USA
Pamela Xaverius, Saint Louis University, USA
Deborah Kiel, Missouri Foundation for Health, USA
Edie Barnard, Missouri Charter Public School Association, USA

Chapter 7 Planning for well-being: a critical perspective on embedding well-being in community-led planning processes
Matthew Jones, Birmingham City University, UK
Amanda Spence, ALT Architecture, UK

Chapter 8 A health map for architecture: The determinants of health and wellbeing in buildings
Louis Rice, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK

Part 3: Society

Chapter 9 Co-constructing community wellbeing: developing a framework to identify how student-community collaborative public space projects impact on community wellbeing
Rachel Sara, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK
Matthew Jones, Birmingham City University, UK

Chapter 10 An inclusive design approach to improving community wellbeing: a case study of architectural interventions in Derry/Londonderry
Jak Spencer, The Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, Royal College of Art, UK
Ralf Alwani The Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, Royal College of Art, UK
Elizabeth Raby The Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, Royal College of Art, UK
Jo-Anne Bichard The Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, Royal College of Art, UK
Jonathan West, The Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, Royal College of Art, UK

Chapter 11 Active ageing and urban sociability: a study on older women
Thaís Debli Libardoni, Federal University of Pelotas, Brazil
Lígia Maria Ávila Chiarelli Federal University of Pelotas, Brazil

Chapter 12 A place to die: New perspectives on preventive work in adolescent suicide
Charlotta Thodelius

Index

Dr Matthew Jones is an Architect and Associate Professor at the Birmingham School of Architecture & Design, Birmingham City University. He is a partner at Coombs Jones Architects, an Advocate in Practice for the Design Commission for Wales and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Matthew's work focuses on collaborative and participatory approaches to design and research. He has particular experience in socially engaged and participatory place-making; community-led planning; housing design; and design in rural contexts.

Dr Fidel Alejandro Meraz is an architectural educator who has been teaching for several years in Mexico and the UK. He has been a lecturer at both University of Nottingham and Nottingham Trent University, and has taught in the now University of Suffolk. He currently teaches in the Department of Architecture and the Built Environment in UWE Bristol contributing to the theoretical and design studio areas in undergraduate and postgraduate levels. His research interests focus on philosophical issues about the relationship between architecture, temporality and place such as spatial collective memory, national identity and the perception of wellbeing.

Dr Louis Rice is a senior lecturer, architect and theorist at the School of Architecture at the University of the West of England in Bristol; specializing in healthy architecture and healthy cities. Dr Rice studied Architecture at Sheffield University and then worked as an architect and urban designer for over a decade in London and Paris. Joining UWE as a senior research fellow as part of the World Health Organisation Collaborating Centre for Healthy Urban Environments, his research focused on healthy and sustainable urban design. He is the author of numerous books and articles on architecture and urban design.

Dr Graham Cairns (Series editor) is an academic and author in the field of architecture who has written extensively on film, advertising and political communication. He has held Visiting Professor positions at universities in Spain, the UK, Mexico, the Gambia, South Africa and the US. He is currently director of the academic research organisation AMPS (Architecture, Media, Politics, Society), and Executive Editor of its associated journal Architecture_MPS. He is also currently Professor and Chair of Architecture at Miami University, Ohio, USA.

Architecture, urban design, public health, participatory design, wellbeing