Sustainable Urban Planning and Its Connection to Environmental Health: A Literature Analysis

Abstract

The topic areas around sustainable urban planning and environmental health have grown in emphasis and research over the past few decades as part of the growing larger topic area of transportation and manufacturing in human-automation interactions. This increase has correlated with the increased attention to overall environmental health as a greater point of local and global work. With the growth and emergence of these subjects, it is pertinent to explore a possible link and connection between the two topics and their respective importance. In this study, a literature review and analysis were conducted using data from Google Scholar and Web of Science and analyzed using Vosviewer, MAXQDA, and Harzing Publish or Perish. Dual searches with the key terms “sustainable urban planning” and “environmental health” were conducted in Google scholar and web of science databases and analyzed for emergence and relevance using site trending analysis tools. Following these two topic area searches, Vosviewer, Harzing Publish or Perish, MAXQDA and Mendeley facilitated a co-citation analysis and content analysis to direct efforts to perform a larger literature review from scholarly articles over a broad range of publishing realms, home countries and authors. The results of the literature review presented results showing a possible connection between trends in both keyword topic areas and the need to analyze these emerging areas further due to their relatively new age. It is believed that future work can best push the fields of sustainable urban planning and benefit environmental health the most through definition of sustainable indicators and metrics, incorporating new technologies, and gathering and leveraging best practices. Human-computer interaction will play a pivotal role in promoting the emerging field of sustainable urban planning to a larger world audience by facilitating the creation and spread of the above future work areas.