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The Role of Health Impact Assessment for Shaping Policies and Making Cities Healthier

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Integrating Human Health into Urban and Transport Planning

Abstract

Health Impact Assessment (HIA) is an important tools to integrate evidence in the decision-making process, and introduce health in all policies. In urban and transport planning, HIAs have been used generally to assess qualitatively urban interventions rather than offering more useful/powerful estimations to stakeholders through quantitative approaches. HIAs could answer various pressing questions such as: what are the best and most feasible urban and transport planning policy measures to improve public health in cities? Also the process on how to get there is often as important as the actual output of the HIA, as the process may provide answers to important questions as to how different disciplines/sectors can effectively work together and develop a common language, how to best incorporate citizen and stakeholder, how different modelling and measurement methods can be effectively integrated, and whether a public health approach could make changes in urban and transport planning.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ISGlobal, Centre for Research in Environmental Epidemiology (CREAL), Barcelona, Spain

    Mark Nieuwenhuijsen, Haneen Khreis, Natalie Mueller & David Rojas-Rueda

  2. Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), Barcelona, Spain

    Mark Nieuwenhuijsen, Haneen Khreis, Natalie Mueller & David Rojas-Rueda

  3. CIBER Epidemiologia y Salud Publica (CIBERESP), Madrid, Spain

    Mark Nieuwenhuijsen, Haneen Khreis, Natalie Mueller & David Rojas-Rueda

  4. Institute for Transport Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

    Haneen Khreis

  5. Transport Studies Unit, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Ersilia Verlinghieri

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  1. Mark Nieuwenhuijsen
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  2. Haneen Khreis
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  3. Ersilia Verlinghieri
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  4. Natalie Mueller
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  5. David Rojas-Rueda
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Correspondence to Mark Nieuwenhuijsen .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Barcelona Institute for Global Health, ISGlobal, Barcelona, Spain

    Mark Nieuwenhuijsen

  2. Texas A&M Transportation Institute, Center for Advancing Research in Transportation Emissions, Energy, and Health, College Station, Texas, USA

    Haneen Khreis

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Nieuwenhuijsen, M., Khreis, H., Verlinghieri, E., Mueller, N., Rojas-Rueda, D. (2019). The Role of Health Impact Assessment for Shaping Policies and Making Cities Healthier. In: Nieuwenhuijsen, M., Khreis, H. (eds) Integrating Human Health into Urban and Transport Planning. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74983-9_29

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