Belfast Priorities

• Healthy Urban Planning; Climate Change & Public Health Emergencies

Integrating health considerations into urban planning and establishing necessary capacity and political commitment to achieve this goal

Objectives:

• Strengthen capacity and understanding of the concept of Healthy Urban Planning (HUP) across sectors and provide evidence base on the links between the built environment, health and health equity and effective interventions which contribute to improved health

• Increase knowledge on local health date, providing evidence for health equity from the start within environment, planning, regeneration, housing and design sectors

• Assist organizations and departments to make health an explicit objective in regional and local policy

• Develop innovative projects that will apply healthy urban planning principles

Current Projects

Indicators for health and regeneration: In Belfast, the five local Area Partnerships have developed Strategic Regeneration Frameworks for each city sector. This provided an opportunity to develop health indicators relevant to regeneration, by a partnership led by Belfast Healthy Cities and Belfast City Council. The project is part of the Building Healthier Communities project, which has 10 participant cities from across Europe and is funded by the EU through the Urbact II fund.

A Health Impact Assessment workshop was conducted on the East Belfast framework with local stakeholders, which resulted in a list prioritising health determinants and impacts. From this basis a set of validated indicators for monitoring health and health equity impacts was identified and refined, initially with East Belfast Partnership. The final outcome will be a flexible, conceptual model, which identifies overarching headline indicators as well as indicator subsets covering economic, social, environmental and access issues. This will allow users to tailor the model to different projects, within the overall framework.

The final indicator set is developed with all Area Partnerships to inform the Office’s Belfast Regeneration strategy for tackling inequalities in health through regeneration. There will also be guidance to support organisations to use the indicators. Next steps will include identifying an opportunity to pilot the indicators and seeking agreement to collate data for new indicators identified within the set.

Healthy Places: Strong Foundations: To strengthen understanding of the links between health and the urban environment, a publication outlining the key issues was published to mark World Health Day 2010. The publication provides an overview of how the built environment contributes to health, and outlines some policy directions than can support health and wellbeing, while also supporting other objectives. It focuses on four core themes: Land use planning, open and green space, transport and housing and regeneration. The publication is intended to start and support a dialogue on how to create a positive living environment for all. It is aimed at three key audiences: planners in the built environment fields, who have the key role in delivering a positive environment; elected representatives, who have or will assume responsibility for planning policy, and health professionals, who can support other professionals with specialist and technical knowledge on health and wellbeing.

Sharing evidence: Submissions to a number of policy consultations and Assembly Committee Inquiries have also been made to share evidence and support policy making.

Healthy Urban Environments Resources