World Urban Forum: Building Smart, Healthy Cities
February 2nd, 2018 | news
On February 11, 2018, JSI’s Building Healthy Cities (BHC) program will host a training event at the Ninth Session of the World Urban Forum in Kuala Lumpur. The event, titled “Building Smart, Healthy Cities – Tools for Embedding Health Considerations into Urban Planning,” will use tools developed through BHC to stimulate participants to dig deeper into how health can be incorporated into urban planning.
By refocusing city policies, planning, and services with a health equity lens and improving data-driven decision making, BHC is enhancing the social determinants of health in Smart Cities in India, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Planning for a Smart City is intrinsically linked to health: transportation, the environment, sanitation, education, recreation, technology, and the built environment all influence the health of an urban population. When decision-making across these areas is harmonized, people will benefit from improved access to health services, decreased environmental and lifestyle risk factors for chronic diseases, a lower burden of infectious diseases, and an increased availability of usable data—related to the social determinants of health—for decision makers.
The training, and the BHC approach, focus on supporting improvements of four sustainable development goals; Goals 3 (Good Health & Well-Being), 10 (Reduced Inequalities), 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities), and 17 (Partnerships for the Goals). The training will help the attendees acquire the requisite knowledge and skills to prepare development plans for their cities in a holistic manner under the New Urban Agenda with the principle of ‘Health in all policies.’
Building Healthy Cities is a three-year cooperative agreement funded by the United States Agency for International Development, and implemented by JSI Research & Training Institute, Inc. (JSI) with partners Urban Institute, International Organization for Migration, and PricewaterhouseCoopers Pvt Ltd.
