How and why integrate health and wellbeing into urban planning projects? An ongoing research project about the dissemination of healthy urban approaches in France

Abstract

The places we live in, their features and quality impact both our health and wellbeing, and are associated with social inequalities. Healthy Urban Planning (HUP) emerged in the 1980s to address these issues, in line with the principles of sustainable development. In France, healthy urban approaches, inspired by HUP, started to develop in the 2010s. Nowadays, their increased development, implementation, diffusion and sustainability encounter certain impediments, such as mediation with political, economic and technical concerns and, also, with other stakes such as the ecological and social impacts of urban planning projects. Studying the terms and conditions of the emergence, implementation and dissemination of these approaches and the arbitrations that take place at the local level is thus of interest for both stakeholders and researchers, and raise important questions related to the definition of “healthy urban approaches”. This questioning has resulted in the start of a three-year action research project currently implemented through my PhD thesis in Urban Planning, undertaken at Nantes Université, Paris Est Université (France) and at an urban consultancy firm (Paris, France).