Towards Healthy Settlements Health Implications of Residential Suburbanization in Guangzhou

This book aims to formulate recommendations for achieving a healthy neighborhood living environment for the middle-income people in China‘s suburbs. In China, the expeditious urbanization triggers the prosperous commodity housing development, which further grows with the spatial restructuring and socioeconomic transition. Residential suburbanization is generated, accompanied with the emergence of new-middle class and the change of lifestyle. However, the health effects of suburbanization in China are overlooked. This book investigates the health performance of suburban residents and the effects of suburban living on residents‘ health. This book also examines the resident-environment transaction modes to unfold the underlying mechanism of suburban living affecting residents’ health. Suburban residents had to passively adapt to their residential environment, which is the obstacle for achieving a health-promoting environment. The institutional dynamics determining the health performance of suburban living environment were addressed with the roles of governments, developers, planners, housing managers, residents‘ committee, and ordinary residents in commodity housing development. The book found no institutional support for the creation of health-promoting environments, especially with default of governments and excessive dependence on developers for public service facilities and the absence of civil society. Thus, the book proposes that institutional innovations are necessary in term of embedding the health dimension in all sectors of the society, enlisting collaboration between public and private sectors, and between health and non-health sectors, and thus cultivating the optimization of residents-environment transactions to create health-promoting environments.

Chapter 1.  Health and suburbanization.- Chapter 2: Linking suburban neighborhoods and human health: A social ecological perspective.- Chapter 3: An empirical survey on the health performance of suburban residents in Guangzhou.- Chapter 4: Neighborhood factors associated with individual health: environmental and behavioral pathways.- Chapter 5: Health promotion opportunities and challenges: suburban housing development and people-environment transactions.- Chapter 6: Towards healthy suburban settlements.

Dr. Tianyao Zhang is an assistant professor in the School of Architecture, Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT Shenzhen), and a Registered Urban Planner, China. She has involved in teaching several courses at HIT including Spatial planning, Urban design, and Rural planning for undergraduate students. As a urban researcher, she is broadly interested in the area of urban health and living environment. Her research focuses on identifying and understanding key pathways of urban environment affecting human health, providing necessary theoretical foundations for evidence-based urban planning and design. She has previously published more than 20 articles in both quality Chinese and English academic periodicals. Dr. Zhang completed her professional planning education at South China University of Technology (B.S.) and Tsinghua University (M.S.), and received her Ph.D at The University of Hong Kong. --Visit her at http://faculty.hitsz.edu.cn/zhangtianyao