As safe as houses? Why standards for urban development matter

ABSTRACT

Standards for designing, improving, and maintaining the built environment have conceptual and practical value for health. Yet, their importance runs the risk of being subsumed in tangential discourses, including over their applicability for particular populations or in particular contexts. This paper applies an integrative systems perspective to several relevant scenarios, while broadly revisiting the health rationale for built environment standards. As with any intervention, standards can have negative unintended consequences, in some cases inducing adverse outcomes. Yet, forgoing standards is not an acceptable answer for sustainable urbanization. The systems perspective adopted here surveys some of the driving forces that underlie adverse outcomes, and suggests potential leverage points and criteria for action.

KEYWORDS:

• Housing
• health
• standards
• urban planning
• systems thinking
• loop diagram

Acknowledgements

This paper was partially inspired by an online debate organized by the University of Montreal in 2016 over the feasibility and utility of housing standards (see Lizarralde 2016, for a full description). We acknowledge the intellectual contribution of the participants in this debate, in particular Prof Gonzalo Lizarralde and Prof Brian Aldrich and the subsequent contribution of Ass Prof Ralph Chapman. We thank the three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments.

Disclosure statement

Prof Philippa Howden-Chapman chaired the WHO Housing and Health Development Group.

Notes

1. The figure was drawn by the two named authors as a result of deliberations leading to the WHO Housing and Health Guidelines Report, but was not published in the final report.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the No funders [No grant].

Notes on contributors

Edmundo Werna

Dr. Edmundo Werna is urbanist currently with the International Labour Office (ILO), United Nations. His previous work comprised, inter alia, research and consultancies about urban health, including for WHO’s Healthy Cities. He also worked on several aspects of urban and infrastructure development. At the ILO, Werna works on such topics preponderantly from an economic and livelihoods standpoint.

José G. Siri

José G. Siri is Senior Science Lead for Cities, Urbanization and Health for the Wellcome Trust's Our Planet Our Health Programme, Dr. José Siri helps manage the programme's portfolio of urban research and build strategic engagement to advance the field of planetary health. Over his career in research and policy, Dr. Siri has worked to develop and apply systems approaches to urban health, focusing on leveraging science for healthy development, developing simple systems tools to catalyze better decision-making, and improving understanding of complex challenges.

David T. Tan

David T. Tan is a interdisciplinary policy researcher using systems methodologies to understand health, urban, and organisational systems. He has recently joined the United Nations Development Programme Accelerator Labs, which seeks to reimagine development for the 21st century.

Philippa Howden-Chapman

Philippa Howden-Chapman, professor of public health at the University of Otago, Wellington, New Zealand, is co-director of He Kāinga Oranga/ Housing and Health Research Programme and director of the New Zealand Centre for Sustainable Cities. She has conducted a number of community housing trials in partnership with local communities, which have had a major influence on housing, health and energy policy. She was chair of the WHO Housing and Health Guideline Development Group and is currently chair of the ISC Scientific Committee for Health & Wellbeing in the Changing Urban Environment: a systems approach.