Healthy Cities

Neighborhoods are places where people spend the most time in their lives. Neighborhoods have a decisive impact on the residents' health. With several important tasks, including the transformation of old neighborhoods, the maintenance of existing neighborhoods, and the construction of new neighborhoods in the future, a scientific and reasonable evaluation standard is urgently needed to guide the development of healthy neighborhoods. To build the evaluation system, this paper first clarifies the principles for selecting evaluation indicators, which include: 1) the indicators are selected from a humanistic perspective; 2) the pathways between neighborhoods environment and health outcomes are deeply considered; 3) the indicators are selected from multiple scales. Secondly, based on the combined perspectives of urban planning and public health, it identifies the indicators that affect the residents' health in neighborhoods and searches the literature through the quality assessment to provide evidence to support the accuracy and effectiveness of the indicators. Finally, it proposes prospect to the evaluation, including 1) it is urgent to improve and utilize the healthy neighborhoods based on the Chinese condition; 2) advanced technologies need to be widely applied in neighborhoods in the future; 3) the transitions in cities should be considered in the future development of neighborhoods. It hopes that relevant researchers and government leaders to realize the importance and urgency of healthy neighborhoods to build more healthy neighborhoods in China.

Details are available HERE. 

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

We thank Gauden GALEA, Xiaopeng JIANG, Kelvin Khow Chuan HENG, Paige SNIDER, Jiani SUN and Xi YIN (in the alphabetic order) from WHO China for their regular inputs and technical discussions.