Designing for Health & Wellbeing: Home, City, Society

Front Cover
Matthew Jones, Louis Rice, Fidel Meraz
Vernon Press, Dec 3, 2019 - Architecture - 290 pages

Rapid urbanization represents major threats and challenges to personal and public health. The World Health Organisation identifies the ‘urban health threat’ as three-fold: infectious diseases, non-communicable diseases; and violence and injury from, amongst other things, road traffic. Within this tripartite structure of health issues in the built environment, there are multiple individual issues affecting both the developed and the developing worlds and the global north and south.


Reflecting on a broad set of interrelated concerns about health and the design of the places we inhabit, this book seeks to better understand the interconnectedness and potential solutions to the problems associated with health and the built environment. Divided into three key themes: home, city, and society, each section presents a number of research chapters that explore global processes, transformative praxis and emergent trends in architecture, urban design and healthy city research. Drawing together practicing architects, academics, scholars, public health professional and activists from around the world to provide perspectives on design for health, this book includes emerging research on: healthy homes, walkable cities, design for ageing, dementia and the built environment, health equality and urban poverty, community health services, neighbourhood support and wellbeing, urban sanitation and communicable disease, the role of transport infrastructures and government policy, and the cost implications of ‘unhealthy’ cities etc. To that end, this book examines alternative and radical ways of practicing architecture and the re-imagining of the profession of architecture through a lens of human health.

From inside the book

Contents

For a Walk With dementia
3
Health cost benefits
25
The Australian dream or a roof over
45
Integrating health equity into
63
Nudging towards urban walkability in
87
a critical
137
An inclusive design approach
205
New perspectives
235
Index
253
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About the author (2019)

Dr Matthew Jones is an Architect and Associate Professor at the Birmingham School of Architecture & Design, Birmingham City University. He is a partner at Coombs Jones Architects, an Advocate in Practice for the Design Commission for Wales and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Matthew's work focuses on collaborative and participatory approaches to design and research. He has particular experience in socially engaged and participatory place-making; community-led planning; housing design; and design in rural contexts.

Dr Louis Rice is a senior lecturer, architect and theorist at the School of Architecture at the University of the West of England in Bristol; specializing in healthy architecture and healthy cities. Dr Rice studied Architecture at Sheffield University and then worked as an architect and urban designer for over a decade in London and Paris. Joining UWE as a senior research fellow as part of the World Health Organisation Collaborating Centre for Healthy Urban Environments, his research focused on healthy and sustainable urban design. He is the author of numerous books and articles on architecture and urban design.

Dr Fidel Alejandro Meraz is an architectural educator who has been teaching for several years in Mexico and the UK. He has been a lecturer at both University of Nottingham and Nottingham Trent University, and has taught in the now University of Suffolk. He currently teaches in the Department of Architecture and the Built Environment in UWE Bristol contributing to the theoretical and design studio areas in undergraduate and postgraduate levels. His research interests focus on philosophical issues about the relationship between architecture, temporality and place such as spatial collective memory, national identity and the perception of wellbeing.

Dr Graham Cairns (Series editor) is an academic and author in the field of architecture who has written extensively on film, advertising and political communication. He has held Visiting Professor positions at universities in Spain, the UK, Mexico, the Gambia, South Africa and the US. He is currently director of the academic research organisation AMPS (Architecture, Media, Politics, Society), and Executive Editor of its associated journal Architecture_MPS. He is also currently Professor and Chair of Architecture at Miami University, Ohio, USA.

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