Healthy Cities

As the increased attention to human settlements and healthy environment from all over the world, ‘healthy cities’ has become one of the most indispensable topics for urban development. Under such circumstance and the concept of “Health China” proposed in 2016, there has been an increasingly concern on the policy of urban tobacco and smoking control. In 2018, the World Health Organization started to focus on “smoking in cities” problem. In this study, WHO China cooperated with the Baidu Big Data department and Tsinghua University to conduct the spatial analysis and statistics research on the situation of urban smokers and the effects of tobacco control policy in China.

We evaluated people’s change of attention for tobacco-related information by using the massive and spatiotemporal query data and user profile data related to smoking problem in 2013 and 2017 offered by Baidu Big Data department. The data covered 2869 urban districts in China. Besides, we assessed the effects of tobacco control policies in Chinese cities based on the tobacco control policies of various cities. The results showed that there has been an increase in people’s awareness and discussion on the legislative content of smoke-free and the areas with high overall smoking attention were concentrated in the Yangtze River Basin. Meanwhile, the significant increase of people’s attention to e-cigarettes and tobacco tax policy was also found. As for the smoker groups, the proportion of smokers under 24 years old, female smokers and smokers with lower education level increased. We further compared the difference between cities with different levels of tobacco control policies and the results revealed the increase in overall attention on smoking in cities with strict smoking restrict policies. In addition, the attention of smoke-free and cessation increased in cities with smoking restrict policies and especially in those with strict smoking restrict policies. Furthermore, as the area with increasing smoke-free attention were obviously scattered around cities with strict smoking restrict policies, we found the policy may exert influence to surrounding area.

Tsinghua University:

Ying Long, Zhaoxi Zhang (Presenter), Jue Ma, Yuyang Zhang

Baidu Big Data Department:

Jidong Peng, Peng Liu, Shengwen Yang, Lu Meng, Xin Mao, Huadong Li

World Health Organization: Gauden Galea, Paige Snider, Ni Jia, Xiaopeng Jiang