On September 27th, CSCC had the pleasure of welcoming Professor Lan Wang, the founder and head of the Healthy City Lab and dean of the College of Architecture and Urban Planning at Tongji University in Shanghai, China. While urban planning is often thought of as a discipline of architecture and order, Professor Lan Wang's research shows the very real consequences poor planning can have on residents' physical and mental health. Professor Lan Wang’s research examines the relationship between urban planning and public health, or as she calls it healthy city science.
However, as Lan Wang points out, this concept of healthy city science is not completely novel. The World Health Organization (WHO), invited the concept of healthy cities in 1994 with the goal of using urban planning as means of improving physical and social environments and expanding community resources. Professor Lan Wang and her team’s research expands on this, focusing on real-world implementation of empirically-driven policy as it affects communities in Shanghai. Lan Wang introduced three key case studies to her team’s research.
The first case study examines the relationship between cognitive health in older adults and their 15-minute walkable neighborhoods. The results of their work showed that factors such as floor-area ratio (FAR) above 2.5, road destiny above 13 km/km2, and more than 600 commercial facilities all increase risk for cognitive health in elders. In contrast to this, her team’s research showed that population density, elderly population destiny, education land use, parks, outdoor sports, and community cultural facilities all act as protective factors for elderly cognitive health.
Similar empirical research was completed for modeling and improving ambulance response time (ART) in Shanghai’s center city. While the WHO denotes ambulance response times should be under 8 minutes. The area was facing an average 12-minute ART. Using road networks, time and date, emergency overloading, and weather as predictors (listed in order of significance), her team was able to create models to predict building-level ART, allowing for precise EMS optimization. Her team was able to identify the high risk neighborhoods for EMS overloads, and utilizing 5G networks, local ART decreased to 8.5 minutes.
Further applying their research, Lan Wang’s team implemented health-oriented micro-urban regeneration in Yangpu park. Taking into account who uses the park and what they want to add, her team was able to turn the dilapidated area into a popular walking and strolling spot. Despite the success of Professor Lan Wang’s empirical work and research, she says that her team has faced challenges applying the same empirical work to other cities in China. Limited datasets and other factors have impacted her team's abilities to implement similar work in other Chinese cities. Nonetheless, her team’s research demonstrates great potential for the future of city planning in China and around the world, particularly in regards to elder communities. With aging populations in Asian countries such as South Korea, Japan, and Thailand, healthy city planning is ever more important. More work needs to be done to mitigate the very real possibility of large-scale elderly health challenges. Communities will need to be strategically built to support the growing population of elderly citizens and to ensure that their needs are properly met. In order to avoid large-scale health crises and inaccessibility for elderly communities, cities around the world need to further consider their city planning and the impact it may have on their communities for better and for worse.