Health, an enduring theme for urban planning

This contribution investigates the relationship between health and planning and describes the impact of the pandemic on the resurgence of health as a topic able to orient urban planning and design policies and practices. Since 2020, due to the Covid_19 pandemic, there has been a growing academic and policy interest to health in the field of planning, though little aware of past disciplinary tradition. Is this recent debate able of placing health at the center of the planning discourse in an innovative way? Or is it a return to the origins, taking up from planning history traditional topics and approaches? This contribution is a theoretical survey conducted through a European and specifically Italian literature review, within the inter-disciplinary research project Coltivare_salute.com funded by Politecnico di Milano. The first section of the paper describes significant episodes in city history for demonstrating that in Western countries health has oriented town planning since its origins, dated back in late XIX century. Planning was born as a need to alleviate the unhealthiness generated by uncontrolled and chaotic urbanization processes (e.g., in the early 19th century’s London invaded by proto-industry or in the first law for urban rehabilitation adopted in 1885 in Naples). We aim at investigating the first planning regulations and techniques dealing with endemic hygienic problems (Ashworth 1954; Benevolo 1971; Zucconi 1988). After the II World War, municipal planning policies started to address similar problems via relevant planning and social methodologies (as the survey on urban fabrics and family composition made in the plan of Assisi, 1955-58) (Astengo 1958), though these were scarcely employed in following decades. During the 1960s, the rise of living standards in Western countries has faded the issue of healthcare into the background. In the second section, we demonstrate that a resurgence in the last 30-40 years of an interest in well-being and quality of life by planning policies in Europe. In the 1990s, in various European countries, public policies reorganized the times of the cities (Mareggi 2002; Mückenberger 2011). In the same years, pushed by the WHO, the Healthy Cities movement emerged to develop innovative approaches to health and sustainable development. Thus, researchers and policy makers oriented their attention to the influence of urban environment on health and the need to conceive integrated policies (Barton, Tsourou 2015; D'Onofrio, Trusiani 2017). More recently, urban health studies have emphasized the assessment of the impacts of the physical and social environment on individual health. The third section questions the extent to which the political and academic debate on urban transformations triggered by the pandemic has brought new innovations, or it has enhanced the acquisitions of urban planning from its origins and the last 30-40 years. We critically discuss a brief overview of planning policies and interventions emerged in the recent years, including for example: the revival of the neighborhood proximity in the “15-minute city” in Paris, the implementation of walkability and cycling and the reorganization of health services in local plans (e.g., Turin and Reggio Calabria) (telemedicine). Emphasis is placed on the role of institutions in enhancing local health. In Italy, the new national recovery plan pushes local administrators to propose and implement solutions for reorganising health and socio-sanitary functions with a specific attention to community health centers. Research findings demonstrate the new interest towards health and healthcare as relevant issues for urban planning. Nevertheless a certain difficulty to capitalize the experiences and skills acquired emerges. In addition, there is conspicuous support for the implementation of innovative solutions, though it is not clear their capacity to generate stable and durable effects.