TOWARDS A HEALTHY CITY

TOWARDS A HEALTHY CITY looks at the built environment as a whole factor for health production and optimisation. It aims to find out how to enable a healthier living environment, while taking into account implications and challenges of connecting communities, spaces, policies and technology to improve the living conditions and health of the cities’ citizens. Much as the discourse around construction, engineering, the urban fabric and the building envelope is focused on a scientifically quantifiable notion of performance, the parameters by which we tend to measure health are limited by such a ‘rational’ approach. Thus, multidisciplinary strategies are explored to negotiate what is needed for human comfort and health.

New angles of collaboration for a future development of healthy cities mean to combine approaches to generate collective (thinking) systems. Developers, city planners, architects and industry need to create new partnerships, and identify what constitutes the ‘appropriate effort’ to support healthy cities. Designers also need to ask themselves how their designs can incentivise healthier lifestyles. At the same time, it is important to investigate the ethics of collecting data on user behaviour and the use of IOT when designing and monitoring these healthy, human-centric environments. The theme therefore involves experts, researchers and protagonists from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds to allow an interdisciplinary approach to find out what actors can initiate to implement the change for a healthier living environment.

Without using the word ‘holistic’ or imagining what ‘healthy’ cities look like, can we design for how they might feel? What they might do? What are the outcomes a healthy space produces, rather than the aesthetic that they reflect? Ultimately, we are interested in exploring research into healthy cities, possibilities of new design and business models and to fundementally reorder the priorities of design.