Health promoting urban environment (PLAN-H)
Project description
The current, dispersed environmental health promotion research provides conflicting evidence for urban planners to apply environmental health research findings. PLANhealth project contributed to the integration of the field by introducing a new place-based, context specific approach. This approach is sensitive to differences in individual lifestyles and identifies various “urban tribes”. It redefined the home zones dynamically and studied the socioeconomic and other barriers of resource accessibility. We identified how various inhabitant groups actually make use of environmental resources in their habitual behavior, how equal the accessibility of environmental resources are and what are the resulting health outcomes. Our locality-based understanding made this possible by incorporating a modified geoinformatics approach of higher spatial-analytical level. The context sensitive approach was possible by public participation GIS (PPGIS) methodology. It has enabled the combination of ‘soft’ subjective data with ‘hard’ objective GIS data. The project contributed to both fundamental understanding of the underlying phenomena of health promotive processes in various contexts as well as increased the applicability of research findings in the highly topical urban densification policy.
Research themes
Active living and urban lifestyles
Child and age-friendly environments
Participatory planning
Private: PPGIS and VGI methods development
Project details
Project contact
Marketta Kyttä
Team members
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Anna Kajosaari
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Tiina Laatikainen
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Kamyar Hasanzadeh