Iran (IMNA) - Cities have become the prime dwellings of people in the modern world. While offering many benefits like access to knowledge, culture, jobs, innovations, etc., the environments which allow urban life become a source of great stress for citizens. The development of cities increases the level of their complexity making people travel long distances, experience traffic congestion, noise and pollution, feel hot, lead a sedentary way of life, see the monotonous landscapes, and feel lonely. Urban environment is efficient; however, efficiency does not ensure the well-being of citizens.
It is one of the main contradictions of urban planning in the modern world. A city can have perfect infrastructure but its citizens can be tired and lonely. A residential area can be developed excellently but it is not pleasant to walk along it. A district can be developed excellently but it will lack places to relax comfortably. The connectivity of a city can increase technologically while people will become less connected to each other and to their surrounding environment.
Urban planning has historically dealt with health by preventing risks. Different achievements such as sanitation systems, safe roads, environmental rules, pollution regulations, housing standards, and available health care services comprise some significant milestones in this regard. However, the health challenges of modern cities require a different approach. The urban landscape has to not only protect people from risks, but also provide conditions for their overall health.
Salutogenesis moves the focus from the cause of sickness to the creation of healthy conditions. Salutogenesis, when applied to urban planning, is a transition from the defensive city to the restorative city. Instead of just making cities not damaging to humans, the goal is now to ensure that they are supportive to them.
Health, as interpreted by salutogenesis, starts not at the moment one arrives at the clinic but much earlier than that. Health starts in the environment in which we spend our everyday lives. How pleasant the walkways are, how many trees there are, where one can sit down comfortably, if there are parks nearby, what kind of square and streetscapes can be found – all of that impacts how we move around and interact with our surroundings.
When Beauty Becomes Public Health Infrastructure
In light of this new conception of urban health, beautification requires renewed consideration. Beauty has for long been seen as something outside the planning process, a finishing touch on top of the so-called “real” planning processes such as infrastructure construction and development. This distinction becomes harder to maintain by the day.
Cities are experienced by all senses. The citizens may feel threatened or pleased by elements such as light, color, greenery, proportion, texture, sound, architecture, landscape, or space. All of them make the environment safe or insecure, friendly or aloof, and memorable or bland.The visual and sensory world cannot be separated from human health; it is part of the everyday world in which human health is either aided or hindered.
The crucial difference between superficial decoration and real beautification lies herein. The salutogenic form of beautification should be understood not in terms of masking urban disorders through beautiful surfaces. The idea of the salutogenic design of environment involves the creation of beautiful and comfortable places where the elements of accessibility, nature, identity, and socializing are combined.
For example, the shaded street allows reducing thermal discomfort and increasing the level of pleasure of walking through the street. The proper design of a public square allows not only creating the visual comfort zone but also making people stay in public space and communicate with each other. Vegetation helps to soften the hardness of the dense environment by making it cooler and more inviting. Public artworks make any anonymous space recognizable and help people feel connected to the place.
It may motivate individuals to walk rather than drive, stay outdoors instead of remaining indoors, and interact with places and develop an emotional bond with their environment. The best examples of beautification projects are those that do not only increase the aesthetics of a city; they make the experience of a city better.
It has major implications in terms of urban identity. When the streets and public spaces express local culture, history, craft, and landscape, citizens recognize parts of their collective memory in the physical environment around them. It is not just a city anymore but an entity with personality and soul.
In the case of historical cities, it provides a unique opportunity for the implementation of the idea of urban identity. It is not the matter of ancient masterpieces or historical architecture, but the rethinking of the cultural code in modern public spaces through landscapes, art, materials, lighting, and urban furniture.
The city that communicates its identity through public spaces is one that promotes the concept of belongingness, which is an integral part of urban life.
The Emotional Geography of Everyday Urban Life
The future of salutogenic planning will also need more consideration paid to another component which has eluded planners in traditional urban design for quite some time: the emotions associated with our surroundings.
Urban settings have psychological qualities. Some settings encourage a visitor to linger. Other settings encourage one to speed through. Some settings instill feelings of curiosity and attachment. Other settings produce feelings of indifference and alienation. All of these emotions might not be measured using conventional means, yet they play an important role in our daily routines.
The emotions of urban life matter since citizens come across the same settings all the time. One might take the same walk along the same streets hundreds of times each year. The psychological effect of that routine can become much more meaningful than an occasional sightseeing trip to the city's main attraction.
This is the reason the common city requires extra-ordinary consideration. A pedestrian path cannot be said to be a successful one if the only way it fulfills its purpose is that it physically connects two points. It must also satisfy its users in terms of making them comfortable, stimulating and safe. A public space cannot be said to be successful only on the basis of satisfying its physical needs. The real success of a public space comes when people want to occupy it.
This same principle holds true in terms of the link between urban design and exercise. People are more prone to include movement in their daily activities if it is pleasant to walk around and reach destinations on foot in a setting which provides an enjoyable experience to do so. Thus, exercise can be integrated into the daily activities in urban settings rather than treating it only as a separate form of health exercise.
Another key aspect of well-being is social health. The dense metropolis may have people close in distance but far apart socially. Density alone does not make community happen. Places need to provide a chance for informal interactions and experiences. Urban parks, squares, pedestrian zones, and neighborhood areas can serve as social infrastructure that allows for meeting each other without any need to buy something or participate in some event.
This is especially crucial for cities undergoing population changes. People of all ages need different sorts of comfort and stimulation, yet they also need to be given the chance to occupy the same urban fabric. Healthy cities need therefore to design environments where all age groups can co-exist naturally, instead of designing the city for only one kind of user.
Children will need stimulating and playful environments, while elders will need comfortable, shaded and accessible spaces in order to still play an active role in public life. For all, this will mean designing environments which provide a reason to stay outdoors. This is where salutogenic planning meets the primary function of public spaces: giving people the opportunity to live the city together.
Redefining the Successful City
The advent of salutogenic urbanism therefore necessarily involves the requalification of the very notion of successful urbanism. The traditional portfolio of indicators remains relevant, but proves insufficient in capturing the overall performance of the urban ecosystem.
For instance, a city can exhibit remarkable levels of economic productivity and physical infrastructure maturity, and yet leave its inhabitants feeling drained rather than invigorated. It can be at the forefront of technological progress, but emotionally sterile; it can boast extensive development, but at the cost of losing the very qualities that made its downtown desirable. The salutogenic city adds another criterion to the list: the contribution of the urban environment to individual well-being.
This implies that the planner has to think beyond the traditional tools of infrastructure development, and consider how hospitals, clinics, the sidewalk, the park, the square, the street tree, the building frontage, the street lamps, the works of art, and the public seating fit into the wider scheme. None of these contribute directly to health outcomes, but all can exert a positive or negative influence on the ways in which people behave, interact, rest, feel safe, experience beauty and engage with their surroundings. This is particularly crucial in the context of emerging digital technologies which can draw individuals into a parallel reality where proximity is simulated, but not experienced. The physical city needs to reacquire its role as a stimulus for human interactions and a medium for building relationships.
The future city is therefore not just a smarter city, it should be a more humane city. The future city’s value and success should not be so much evidenced in its skyline or in its infrastructure as it is by the quality of mundane moments enjoyed by its citizens, in people’s inclination to walk, older residents’ willingness to sit in squares, children’s freedom to wander and roam, interaction and social mixing in urban squares, residents’ affection for place, and people’s emotional engagement with place.
This represents the true meaning of salutogenic urbanism, elevating physical beautification from a purely decorative practice into a tangible, determinant aspect of urban well being by leveraging the health related effects of nature, design, culture, access, and beauty to shape our interactions.
The ideal city of the future will not simply be one where we can successfully remediate air pollution, avoid accidents or efficiently access healthcare. It should be one designed to enhance an individual’s capacities to recover attention, initiate and sustain movement, foster positive relationships, reinforce cultural identification and inject unexpected instances of pleasure into the everyday.
In this optimal rendering then, urban planning need not primarily orchestrate spaces for things, but should organize the conditions under which lives can be better spent.
Such indeed is the aspiration for the salutogenic city; a city which does not merely house people, but is a supportive force that cultivates a person's physicality, emotional robustness, and his sociality and attachment to place. The index for progress toward a desired urban environment is likely not found within statistics for physical systems such as infrastructure, but rather in human capacity for well-being-whether or not residents feel better by living there. Consequently, this future city must be not merely smarter, but also more human and more vital, not through its skyline or infrastructure, but its ordinary human life: walking.
The healthiest cities of the future will not simply be those that remove pollution, reduce accidents or provide efficient healthcare. They will be cities that deliberately create environments capable of restoring attention, encouraging movement, supporting social relationships, strengthening cultural belonging and offering moments of pleasure within everyday life.
Urban planning, at its most ambitious, should therefore do more than organize space.
The salutogenic city represents precisely this ambition: a city that does not merely accommodate human beings, but actively supports their physical vitality, psychological resilience, social connection and emotional attachment to place.
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