Integrated Urban Development and Health Integrated Urban Development and Health Programme and Reality in Hamburg. A Documentary Analysis

Abstract

Legal regulations and funding programmes of (integrated) urban development, both at the federal and Hamburg level, require socio-spatial collaboration with health promotion. To what degree can the programmatic integration of health promotion into urban development be found in implementation documents? An internet search was conducted in the "Transparency Portal" of Hamburg, containing more than 100,000 official documents, using three approaches: 1.) search with 7 central concepts of urban development and the appearance of health themes within them; 2.) finding the "Integrated Development Concepts" (planning papers) of 10 model projects of the funding programme "Social City" and identification of health themes within them; 3.) search of the internet pages of the two most important institutions for health promotion after identifying documents indicating their cooperation with bodies of urban development (Hamburg Authority for Health and Consumer Protection; Hamburg Working Group for Health Promotion). Health aspects in areas with special needs have not been taken into consideration as much as the programmes would require. However, there are some positive examples. Current details of collaboration can be seen on the internet pages of the Hamburg Working Group for Health Promotion. The (pilot) study has the problem that references to health in official documents can lead to both over- and under-estimations of the activities in reality. However, it could be shown that there are models of good practice which should be more widely used in order to reduce the gap between programmes and reality. Some recommendations for this purpose are presented for further discussion.