Barriers and Enablers of Integrating Health Evidence into Transport and Urban Planning and Decision Making

Abstract

Global rates of urbanisation are on the rise. By 2050 around 70% of the ten billion global population is expected to be living in cities. Whilst cities are centres of education, wealth creation, innovation and progress they are simultaneously characterized by pollution, congestion, noise, heat and overcrowding, adversely impacting human health on a global scale. Strategic and comprehensive urban and transport planning and policy that integrates health can ameliorate some of these negative impacts. The evidence base for how we should be building our cities of the future is there. Nonetheless, current urban and transport planning fails to optimise health outcomes. This chapter discusses the barriers and enablers to effectively integrating health evidence into urban and transport planning decision making. These barriers are discussed under the themes of (1) differing understandings of health between sectors (2) differing understandings of evidence and difficulties around evidence translation (3) governance and politics and (4) institutional context. The second part of the chapter puts forward solutions to overcoming these barriers and suggests that enabling factors reside in improving communication and collaboration across sectors and disciplines. Such collaboration is likely to be facilitated by changes both to the institutional context in which decisions are made and to the way research is developed and communicated.