Developing a Health-Spatial Indicator System for a Healthy City in Small and Midsized Cities

Overview

Journal Int J Environ Res Public Health

Publisher MDPI

Specialties Environmental Health
Public Health

Date 2022 Mar 25

PMID 35328982

Authors

Jiemei Luo

Edwin H W Chan

Jinfeng Du

Linxia Feng

Peng Jiang

Ying Xu

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

A recent examination of the significant role of public health has prompted calls to re-investigate how the urban environment affects public health. A vital part of the solution includes Healthy City initiatives that have been the subject of extensive policies, implications, and practices globally. However, the existing literature mainly focuses on big cities and metropolitan areas, while investigations into small and midsized cities (SMCs) are lacking, and thus reflect the underlying issues of health inequity. This study develops an indicator system for evaluating Healthy City initiatives in SMCs, linking urban design and public health, supported by the analyzed opinions from experts collected using both questionnaires and interviews. The indicator system includes six primary dimensions and 37 variables: urban form and transportation (UFT); health-friendly service (HFS); environmental quality and governance (EQG); community and facility (CF); green and open space (GOS); and ecological construction and biodiversity (ECB). A fuzzy synthetic evaluation technique was used to assess the relative importance of factors, emphasizing the importance of UFT, HFS, and EQG, with importance indexes of 0.175, 0.174, and 0.174, respectively. This indicator system is helpful for SMCs seeking to construct a Healthy City in the future, and is based on urban design and governance inputs and for enhancing the Healthy City knowledge base of cities of varied scales.

Citing Articles

Will urban scale affect health services inequity? The empirical evidence from cities in China.

Wang H, Xu K, Fang H, Lin H, Zeng H Front Public Health. 2024; 12:1330921.

PMID: 39040863 PMC: 11260790. DOI: 10.3389/fpubh.2024.1330921.

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