Health-supportive city planning. Integrating perspectives from residents, professionals, and policy officers on public health risk factors in the built environment

Abstract

Determining what a health-supportive city environment entails has been running into issues of non-linearity and social reality that influence the relation between people, place and health in a complex manner. To gain more insights in the complex relation between people, place and health, the role of poly-rationality in relation to spatial aspects for health was studied by employing the Cultural Theory of Risk. Through performing a constant comparative analysis the perspectives of all actors involved in the planning process in relation to certain urban planning for health domains were collected. It was found that for every healthy city aspect studied, poly-rationality plays a role in the understanding of how actors approach various healthy planning solutions and management options. Between the actors, differences could be identified in approaching the spatial aspects that were studied: Residents were found to employ all rationalities, contractors were found to be mainly egalitarian and the municipality was found to be mainly hierarchical. These different approaches could lead to situations of friction and misunderstanding between actors in the process of spatial planning. . To move forward from situations of friction and misunderstanding, strategies from various points of view regarding rationality are recommended. Insights in the four rationalities has explained to some extent what the source is of the non-linearity problem in health-supportive city planning.