Creation of health-oriented city space as a way to manage population health risk

Abstract

Nowadays intense urbanization is taking place, cities with a number of dwellers over a million and urban agglomerations appear, and it calls for new ways how to preserve and improve health of urban population who are exposed to various risk factors, primarily environmental and behavioral ones. One of such ways could be development of a city as health-oriented physical, social, and semantic space; that is, it should be an environment that has natural, material, socio-cultural and other resources and they are used to create possibilities for individuals and social groups to preserve and improve their health. Parameters of a physical component in health-oriented space and their possible indicators can be found in foreign concepts and international projects ("healthy city", "active city", "age-friendly city"), as well as in Russian management practices ("Creation of comfortable urban environment" project, a concept of urban space quality). This article focuses on a detailed system of indicators that can be applied to assess whether a health-oriented urban environment is well-developed; the system is based on risk-oriented approach and includes two groups of indicators. The first one comprises indicators that describe a health-preserving component in urban space that allows to control health risk factors better; the second one includes indicators that are related to a health-improving component that helps to improve health and to promote stability. As morbidity and mortality among urban population vary greatly in their structure depending on countries and regions, health-oriented urban space should be created taking into account health peculiarities of population living on a specific territory. In other words, detected leading causes for mortality and morbidity among urban population in Russia as well as manageable risk factors that cause them should serve as grounds for a creation of such a body-space urban environment that will be oriented at reduction in negative impacts exerted by chemical contamination of the environment on population health (planting, alternative transport infrastructure, compliance of drinking water sources with sanitary-epidemiologic requirements, quality of water supplies and distribution systems); such system will also provide conditions for sufficient physical activity and health nutrition.

Keywords

• urban space
• health-oriented space
• healthy city
• health risk
• risk management