The postwar period has seen multiple organisations, governments and professions heading in non-sustainable, unhealthy directions – a trend that needs reversing with a sense of urgency, and through multidisciplinary collaboration. This, argued Healthy City Design keynote speaker Dan Burden, director of innovation and inspiration at Blue Zones, can only happen when a new, united approach is applied to city making.
With human and planetary health under increasing stresses, urban planners need to create more comprehensive theories and tools for action to support city resilience and the wellbeing of citizens – but it’s vital to learn from history and the consequences of earlier thinking. So said Mark W Johnson, a landscape architect and founding principal of Civitas, in a stirring keynote at the Healthy City Design 2019 congress.
Our planet is changing in unprecedented ways and which directly threaten human health. Such changes also bring opportunities to protect and improve health, if we can respond appropriately. Since 2015, the Wellcome Trust’s ‘Our Planet, Our Health’ programme has supported a community of researchers in taking on the challenges that food systems, increasing urbanisation, and climate change pose to our health.
Research carried out a couple of years ago by Ipsos MORI and experts for Innovate UK found that citizens want technology to make life in our future cities easier, but they also want equality of access and social interaction to be prioritised. This keynote will build on this research and give delegates insight into citizens’ views of cities across the globe.
Art and cultural activities can be thought of as multimodal health interventions, which combine lots of different components that are positive for people’s health. So said Dr Daisy Fancourt, Associate Professor of Psychobiology and Epidemiology at University College London, during a keynote talk at Healthy City Design that drilled deep into the detail about the influence of the arts on health.
Music is the most under-recognised, undervalued, under-utilised asset on the planet, and it isn’t being used to its full potential. This was Julia Jones’ opening salvo at Health City Design 2019, as she delivered a keynote on the power of music to help improve health and wellbeing, and become part of a city’s utopian vision.
