Making post-war urban neighbourhoods healthier: involving residents’ perspectives in selecting locations for health promoting urban redesign interventions

ABSTRACT

Post-war urban neighbourhoods in industrialised countries have been shown to negatively affect the lifestyles of their residents due to their design. This study aims at developing an empirical procedure to select locations to be redesigned and the determinants of health at stake in these locations, with involvement of residents’ perspectives as core issue. We addressed a post-war neighbourhood in the city of Groningen, the Netherlands. We collected data from three perspectives: spatial analyses by urban designers, interviews with experts in local health and social care (n = 11) and online questionnaires filled in by residents (n = 99). These data provided input for the selection of locations to be redesigned by a multidisciplinary team (n = 16). The procedure yielded the following types of locations (and determinants): An area adjacent to a central shopping mall (social interaction, traffic safety, physical activity), a park (experiencing green, physical activity, social safety, social interaction) and a block of low-rise row houses around a public square (social safety, social interaction, traffic safety). We developed an empirical procedure for the selection of locations and determinants to be addressed, with addressing residents’ perspectives. This procedure is potentially applicable to similar neighbourhoods internationally.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban health
• urban design
• intervention
• post-war neighbourhood
• Netherlands

Acknowledgments

We thank the full team of urban designers, municipal advisors, and citizen representatives as outlined in the biographical note for their contribution to the project, in particular Marieke Zwaving, city of Groningen, and Derk den Boer, neighbourhood Paddepoel representative.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical approval

Ethical clearance for the fieldwork of this study has been provided by the Ethical Review Board of the Delft University of Technology, 2020/1123.

Geolocation

This regards the Paddepoel neighbourhood of the city of Groningen, the Netherlands.

Notes on contributors

The consortium Urban Design for Improving Health in Groningen (UDIHiG) entails scientists and practitioners from health sciences, design disciplines, change management with a focus on co-creation, and city and citizens – to develop a methodology that optimizes the involvement of the residents. Urban planners including the city architect are involved; they introduce intervention techniques from a field that, although health motives determined its evolution, developed outside the scope of the health sciences. Incorporating this domain aligns with the WHO’s ‘health in all policies’ initiative and the ambition to integrate the findings of the project in future projects of the city of Groningen.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/23748834.2023.2197165.

Additional information

Funding

This study has been supported by a grant from ZonMw, the Dutch national funder of research in health and health care, grant 5310013221. This sponsor had no role in any part of the study (i.e. not in design; collection, analysis and interpretation of data; writing of the report; and decision to submit the article for publication).