Search

This editorial serves as the introduction to a special issue of Built Environment, focusing on the convergence of urban planning and public health. As one of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals, enhancing health remains a critical objective, with the 2030 Agenda underscoring the importance of the 'city' and 'place' as the locus for delivering transformative solutions.While there exists a corpus of research advocating for prescribed actions to mitigate public health issues and to incorporate health into urban decision-making, these studies frequently skew towards normative and practice-based solutions. Concurrently, there exists a dearth of systematic research dedicated to disentangling the intricate governance structures and the cross-sectoral policy-making dynamics pertinent to urban planning as a solution to public health problems.This special issue addresses this gap, presenting a compilation of papers that apply a critical theoretical lens and innovative methodological approaches. These resources serve to enrich our comprehension of the interplay amongst different actor groups and policy sectors during the dynamic decision-making process that shapes urban planning. Consequently, this facilitates the delivery of improved public health outcomes within both the United Kingdom and other international contexts.

In this paper, we argue that to tackle complex issues such as urban health, there is a need of not only understanding the limitation of different policy sub-systems, but also the interplay of the ideas, interests, and institutional arrangements that underpin cross-boundary challenges. This paper unpacks the dynamics of policymaking between public health and spatial planning by adopting boundary spanning policy regime theory to trace the alignment and divergence of urban health issues across the two policy subsystems in England. Greater Manchester, heralded as an exemplar of collaborative governance in England, is used as a case study to test the strength of and tensions within the urban health policy regime.

There has been a lack of coherent spatial thinking in policymaking in the UK due to political and economic considerations. This discussion, based on a spatial planning perspective, explains how the UK government’s often aspatial approach to policymaking and hiding behind the façade of market-led ideology does not stand the test when examining the R&D regional expenditure patterns. It also illustrates that complex layers of administrative boundaries have created a confusing governance structure and closed development possibilities. It finally sheds light on the experience of being a critical friend of the policy community to engender mutual learning.

Despite being a global urban policy laboratory with a diversity of research topics and case studies being reported, we still do not have a holistic understanding of urbanisation across different parts of China. We therefore pose three pertinent questions for discussion in this commentary: whether Chinese urbanisation research has reached a plateau of development and what are the prime sites of research; how has the policy and research environment in China created its own distinctive, interacting traditions of practical activity and intellectual inquiry; and what are the prospects of having more original conceptual thinking and theorisation of urbanisation processes in China? Our analysis highlights the spatially variegated landscape of publications, which closely mirrors China’s urban administrative hierarchy. We explain the paradoxical culture of urban research encountered by Chinese early career researchers through their constant struggle in the knowledge transfusion process of Western theories and their use in Chinese urbanisation research. The dynamic relationship between theoretical and methodological development; the need for innovative comparative research; and better data infrastructure and data sharing practice are seen as the ways forward.

In this collection of short articles, we explored how a diverse group of theories, methodologies, and practices of spatial planning can help us unpack and better understand smart cities and sustainable development. Using the cases of Greater Manchester in the UK and Shenzhen in China, our emphasis was to identify innovative but actionable approaches of smart and sustainable planning for smart and equitable growth, lower carbon emissions, and environmental resilience to enhance the well-being of urban communities.