Healthy Environment and Healthy Living in Urban China: An Emerging Field in Research

Abstract

Chinese urban lifestyle has been drastic transformed due to the rapid urban expansion and motorization. Due to the decrease of physical activity and increase intakes of fat and animal foods, the prevalence of overweight and obesity and related health problems in China has risen. As a result, considerable public health concerns have started to manifest. Experts urge that both central and local governments should allocate more resources to create environments that enhance physical and emotional quality of life, in particular to build healthy physical environments conducive to walking and bicycling. This paper reviews this emerging research field in China, focusing on physical activities, diet, obesity, and their relations with environmental building.

Keywords:

• environmental building
• healthy city
• healthy living

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lin Lin

Lin LIN is a researcher at Shanghai Key Lab for Urban Ecological Processes and Eco-Restoration, College of Ecological and Environmental Sciences, East China Normal University (ECNU), Shanghai, China. She is also a Committee member of Ecological Health and Human Ecology, the Ecological Society of China. After her doctoral study in urban design and planning at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA, she joined ENCU in 2011. Her research interests lie in conceptualizing and understanding the reciprocal relationship between the built environment, human behaviors, and public health. One of her recent publications is “Walking, obesity and urban design in Chinese neighborhoods” in Preventive Medicine, 2014 (69) with her collaborators from New York University.

Hongwei Jiang

Hongwei JIANG is researcher of Research Institute for Humanity and Nature. He received his Ph.D. in 2006 from the University of Tokyo and later worked as a Project assistant professor at the Department of Human Ecology, School of International Health, Graduate School of Medicine, the University of Tokyo. Since 2010, he has joined the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature as a researcher. His research interests include human ecology, environmental health, China and Southeast Asian studies. Recently, he published “Double Burden of Malnutrition in Rural West Java: Household-Level Analysis for Father-Child and Mother-Child Pairs and the Association with Dietary Intake” with Dr. Sekiyama and other teammate in Nutrients, 2015 (7), pp. 8376–8391.