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Contents:
Sarah Curtis - How Can We Address Health Inequality Through Healthy Public Policy in Europe?
In many parts of the world, there is growing commitment to the idea that public policy and public interventions in all domains (not only the medical and public health sector) should be scrutinized in terms of their potential impact on public health for the populations affected. Prospective Health Impact Assessment (HIA) considers the likely significance of these potential public health outcomes. This article considers some examples of strategies which are being used in European countries to facilitate HIA. These are interpreted in terms of theories of a world risk society, put forward by Ulrich Beck. The application of HIA to promote healthy public policy is complex because it crosses professional, disciplinary and geographical borders and involves some challenging issues of knowledge translation and social construction of environmental risks. It therefore shares some characteristics with other forms of regional planning for sustainable development.This article considers the relevance of literature from regional science concerning the appropriate scale and type of agency to handle complex regional planning issues and how to create learning regions that successfully integrate new knowledge into regional policy. HIA also poses some broader general questions about the role of science in society.This article considers the implications for the communication of research findings on health risk, and the contribution of geography and regional science to interdisciplinary research in this field.
R. A. Verheij et. al. - Urban—Rural Health Differences and the Availability of Green Space
It is argued that urban—rural health differences, which are found in many studies, may be at least partially associated with the availability of green space. Until recently there was only limited evidence from experimental research for this relationship, but recent large-scale epidemiological work found new evidence for the association between urban—rural health differences and availability of green space. It is argued that this would fit in with the theories of the classic urban sociologists Wirth and Milgram and the theories of environmental psychologists like Kaplan and Kaplan. The availability of new evidence and the fit into the classic theories would also justify renewed attention for green space in urban planning.
Karin Fröding et. al. - Partnership for Healthy Neighbourhoods: City Networking in Multilevel Context
Social polarization in the urban landscape means that there are a lot of neighbourhoods with a concentration of residents suffering from high crime rates, a loss of feeling of safety, ethnic conflicts and general decay. Local and national governments respond to these challenges by adopting urban development programmes with a pronounced area-based orientation. Inspired by the global Healthy Cities Programme, some of these initiatives have an explicit public health-related focus. This article analyses the possibilities and obstacles for an initiative of this kind undertaken by four Swedish cities under the label Partnership for Sustainable Welfare Development. Sustainable development, healthy cities, neighbourhood and partnership are concepts rhetorically underpinning the policy intervention under study. After a brief, critical survey of these concepts the article presents the empirical study undertaken on the basis of interviews, official documents and participatory observation. Finally the results of this study are summarized and related to some of the literature in this field. It is found that the role of the partnership as a node for mutual learning and coordination is held in high esteem by the partnership participants. Other qualities given high priority by them are the need for comprehensive, long-term planning and residents' participation and influence. However, from a more distanced point of view it is also obvious that the approach has its limitations due to the fact that even successful interventions cannot affect the fundamental causes of urban social polarization as these causes relate to general socio-economic cleavages in society.
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