Health Impact Assessment Handbook for the Built Environment

This book is a practical introductory resource for planning, environmental and public health professionals, enabling them to improve the health and wellbeing of local communities and neighbourhoods. It provides context on the importance of health and wellbeing, focusing on health issues in four major areas: spatial planning, urban development, transport planning and waste management. The book also discusses the role of sustainability and communities in planning and building healthy communities. Practical guidance is given on using health impact assessments: when and how to scope them, as well as commissioning and implementing a HIA. Books on health impact assessment have taken a largely theoretical perspective with little practical detail for non-HIA professionals on how they can apply these assessments their real world context of developing plans and projects in resource limited environments. This book provides a major first stepping stone for busy practitioners wanting to know how to create healthy neighbourhoods without a dense theoretical or strongly HIA practitioner perspective, and will fill a major gap in the current book market. It offers a range of approaches, real world examples and practical tools to enable them to incorporate health and wellbeing considerations into the design stage.