Enabling Healthy Placemaking

This new report by the Royal Town Planning Institute calls for greater levels of cooperation and collaboration between health, social care, and planning professionals to ensure people’s health needs are integrated into the conceptualisation, design and planning stages of new developments in the future.

Highlighting a select number of case studies for healthy placemaking, such as the Live Well programme in Chelmsford and Planning for Health in South Worcestershire, it pulls out seven ways to enable planners overcome barriers and lead the way in creating healthy and sustainable communities. They are:

1. Move the Debate Forward for effective implementation.
2. Make Collaboration Work to ensure greater levels of cooperation.
3. Formalise health principles in planning decisions, such as reference to Health Impact Assessments.
4. Equip planners with the right skills to help the implementation of health based approaches to placemaking.
5. Resource Planning adequately to ensure the delivery of healthy, sustainable places and inclusive communities. 
6. Engage the public in planning decisions to foster social capital, a sense of community and individual well-being.
7. Shape the future. Draw on the green shoots of recovery, harnessing the benefits of digital tools and principles of ‘green recovery’.