Exploring the Potential for Planning Support Systems to Bridge the Research-translation Gap Between Public Health and Urban Planning

Abstract

Background: There is consensus that planning professionals need clearer guidance on the features that are likely to produce optimal community-wide health benefits. However, much of this evidence resides in academic literature and not in tools accessible to the diverse group of professionals shaping our cities. This paper explores the role of planning support systems (PSS) to facilitate the translation and application of health evidence into urban planning and design practices to create healthy, liveable communities.Methods: A review of PSS software and studies featuring a planning support system with a built environment and health impact assessment for designing and creating healthy urban areas was undertaken. Customising existing software, a health impact PSS (the Urban Health Check) was then developed and applied to a real-world planning application with an industry partner allowing for: (i) automated calculation of built environment variables; (ii) “sketch planning” functionality; and (iii) a health impact indicator that estimates the probability of walking for transport. A participatory evaluation framework evaluated the "utility", "usability", and "usefulness" of the Urban Health Check.Results: Eleven PSS software applications were identified, of which three were identified as having the capability to undertake health impact analyses. Three studies met the inclusion criteria of presenting a planning support system customised to support health impact assessment with health impacts modelled or estimated due to changes to the built environment. Evaluation results indicated the Urban Health Check PSS helped in four key areas: visualisation of how the neighbourhood would change in response to a proposed plan; understanding how a plan could benefit the community; Communicate and improve understanding health of planning and design decisions that positively impact health outcomes; engagement – allowing community members to provide direct feedback and see the immediate implications of amendments to a proposed plan. Conclusions: The use of health-impact PSS have the potential to be transformative for the translation and application of health evidence into planning policy and practice, providing those responsible for the policy and practice of designing and creating our communities with access to quantifiable, evidence-based information about how their decisions might impact community health.

Development of a planning support system to evaluate transit-oriented development masterplan concepts for optimal health outcomes

“…Ours is one of few projects to develop a robust, empirically based health impact PSS specifically developed to estimate baseline and custom scenario health impacts of planning and urban design concepts. This contribution supports previous work (Hooper et al, 2021; Schooner et al, 2018; Boulange et al, 2018), indicating that PSS represent a potential toolkit for the integration, translation and application of health evidence into urban design and planning practice.…”

“…PSSs that are designed to facilitate HIA are known as health impact decision support systems (Ulmer et al, 2015). A previous review (Hooper et al, 2021) of PSS incorporating health-related metrics found these provide an opportunity to apply empirical evidence on built environment relationships with health-related outcomes to inform real-world land use and transportation planning decisions (Hooper et al, 2021). These tools allow the exploration and potential impact/s of different design concepts on selected health and well-being outcomes (Boulange et al, 2017(Boulange et al, , 2018Hooper et al, 2021;Schoner et al, 2018).…”