Urban policies and the creation of healthy urban environments: A review of government housing and transport policy documents in the United Kingdom

Abstract

Urban environments are key health determinants and play a critical role in improving health outcomes and equity. However, urban policies in the United Kingdom (UK) and globally frequently fail to produce healthy towns and cities. Given the highly centralized nature of UK policy, we analyzed national UK policy documents published since 2010 in two key areas of urban policy: housing supply and transport. We found that health is largely absent in narratives shaping urban development and, where health is included, it is as an assumed indirect outcome of delivering other policy agendas. Thus, we recommend that explicit direct and measurable health objectives must be integrated front and center in urban policies, and cross-sector collaboration across national government on health prevention to manage the complex linkages across policy areas. Evidencing the interactive effects between improving health outcomes and dominant urban policy agendas can incentivize shared accountability for health outcomes.