VIRTUAL: Livable Cities – New York

Abstract

This research paper reflects upon the increasing disjunct between the processes driving urban planning and public health within the contemporary context of unabated urban growth and socio-economic inequity. In doing so, the paper critically examines the deep-rooted and intrinsically entangled hurdles that city reforming initiatives face for conceiving and actualizing healthy and equitable urban environments: Empathic Cities.
The paper outlines the complex relationship between the role of urban development policies advanced by urban planners, their social, economic, and environmental implications, and consequently their influence on the health and wellbeing of the everyday citizen. This relationship, intertwined with the exponential pace of technological progress, is explored in an unbiased manner by tracing the slow but steady decoupling of the disciplines of urban planning and public health. Both disciplines are thus examined simultaneously, and links between the two are established to identify how and when public health diverted from a community engineering and urban design integrated focus (that was highly beneficial to the domain of urban planning), to a medical principles-based model. Similarly, the paper traces the evolution of urban planning with its initial principles aligned with community wellbeing and structural efficiency to a scenario where its principles have become the basis of socio-spatial fragmentation resulting in prevalent inequity. The paper concludes by establishing correlations and fault lines inhibiting the nexus of these disciplines from a systems perspective and argues for a much-needed shift from a closed systems approach that favours environmental control to an open systems perspective that is inherently inclusive, participatory, and embraces an ecological world view. The authors deem this exemplar shift as essential to attain truly empathic cities that embed health as a core value of an inherently open planning paradigm.