congress team:
Laura Verdelli (Italy/France) & Serin Geambazu (Romania)
Al-Fereej is the colloquial term used in the Gulf dialect to describe a neighbourhood. The term is highly flexible, and can refer to the street itself, the community you are a part of, or the district you are located in. Fereej can also describe the way in which families in the Gulf have typically oriented themselves in urban living, typically living in dense tribal clusters of courtyard houses. The term is iconic to Gulf living, and many neighbourhoods in Qatar and its surrounding states have Fereej in their name, such as: Fereej bin Abdulaziz, Fereej bin Omran, Fereej Kulaib, and more. Fereej style living still exists and thrives in Doha and its suburbs and helps elevate the quality of life experienced by urban residents in Qatar.
Track 2 is guided by the idea of integrating well-being within urban habitats, with reference to innovative and emerging concepts that can contribute to the unlocking of planning. The goal is to help decision makers in making choices about economic, environmental, urban and demographic options. In the long term, the suggestions proposed by the valuation of well-being and health should help to influence economic dynamics, to suggest spatial planning measures through urban planning documents, to enhance the performance of societies and their environment through improved governance and resilience.
Following the current pandemic, what will be the new urban concepts concerning health and well-being? What will we have learned from this pandemic? Will we face a new urban paradigm shift, comparable to the one that transformed our cities over a century ago, known as The Hygienist Movement?
The sub-themes include but are not limited to the topics of:
Public health, healthy cities and cities dealing with lifestyle diseases (controlling pollutions, access to healthy resources and managing health system responses);
Pandemic resilient urbanism: protecting health and quality of living, promoting sport and leisure activities and green open spaces, tending to equitability, minimising risks and threats. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), 8.2 million out of the 12.6 million annual deaths caused by poor quality environment and habitat are due to non-communicable diseases, primarily linked to air pollution. Stroke, heart disease, unintentional injuries, cancers and chronic respiratory infections are the top 5 causes of environmental-related deaths;
Food justice and food security. Inequality of food supply chains, where one, aimed at affluent populations, respects the environment and the producers to yield high-quality food products from local and short supply chains; while the other, aimed at less affluent populations, yields poorer quality, often heavily processed products, coming from far away, produced in disastrous environmental conditions. Health and sustainability issues include accessibility to good food; local and environmentally friendly agricultural production; urban agriculture - including in its social role, etc.;
Well-being, linked to cultural and environmental issues, exploring methods that can offer operational extensions. In the economic evaluation of amenities, well-being is placed as one of the fundamental criteria for the evaluation of the quality of life in the context of environmental changes.
