Lessons learned from co-constructing a guide on healthy urban planning and on integrating health issues into environmental impact assessments conducted on French urban development projects

Abstract

Recent regulatory evolutions gave the opportunity to professionals and academics from the health, urban planning and environment sectors – within a working group – to conduct in-depth research at a national level on health challenges in the field of EIA procedure and urban planning. This work resulted in the publication of a guide aimed at all actors involved in the urban planning decision process, which has now become a national reference document. Among the key findings of this project, three main concrete outputs caught our attention: a reference framework for Healthy Urban Planning (HUP); an all-encompassing tool for analysing urban planning projects ‘with a health lens’; an operational tool aimed at French regional health agencies (ARS) to help them formulate their health statements within the framework of the EIA regulatory procedure applied to urban development projects. This paper reviews the process of co-constructing the guide with special attention paid to the ARS tool, present the key findings and outputs and discuss the potential of the EIA process in promoting HUP in the current French context.

Keywords:

• Environmental impact assessment
• human health
• tool
• healthy urban planning
• urban development project

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Ministry of Health for their support in this project and the long list of members who collaborated in this work (professionals and academics from public health, urban and environment sectors). We are also grateful to Annick Paisley for the English translation.

Notes

1. In the international littérature, it is also called ‘Environmental impact statement’ (EIS). We decided to use the expression ‘EIA report’ in order to match the language used in the European directive 2014/52/EU.

2. Link to the guide’s web page (in French): https://www.ehesp.fr/2014/09/16/nouveau-guide-agir-pour-un-urbanisme-favorable-a-la-sante-concepts-outils/