Design codes for healthand wellbeing

The built and natural environment are fundamental building blocks for people’s physical and mental health and wellbeing. As well as forming the physical setting to our lives, our homes and neighbourhoods
significantly influence our wellbeing and patterns of behaviour. The design of neighbourhoods inform our behaviour, and are central to ensuring the long-term health of our communities. This document provides guidance to all of those involved in the design code process, and those interested in prioritising healthy placemaking principles within the built environment. As a reference guide, the document establishes a
policy framework and baseline, before outlining specific principles that should be incorporated
into the content of health-focussed design codes. The document does not outline reasons to start a code, or information on the process of preparing a code or the resources/timeframe involved, as this information is widely available from other sources.

This document will help in:
a. understanding local health issues and priorities;
b. developing a vision for health-based area coding; and
c. establishing coding requirements to ensure healthy placemaking.

Design codes set out expectations for the design of buildings, spaces and places. They are an important planning tool for shaping homes and neighbourhoods. Design codes apply to those elements that can be
controlled through the planning process, and are predominately instructions to developers and architects that bring forward planning applications. Most design codes are focussed on new development, but they may also apply to existing places (or where there is another mechanism for delivering these changes, for
example funding for retrofit). The benefits of design codes include the ability to:
1. Shape places through clear design requirements.
2. Build trust through engagement and collaboration.
3. Make decision making more efficient, and create certainty through clarity and a common
understanding.
4. Facilitate building of more and better homes and places by setting aspirational requirements.

By focussing on health and wellbeing, places have the potential to deliver additional long-term benefits to communities, including the reduction of health inequalities. Making health considerations central to the design code (and wider framework of policy) ensures development proposals are being shaped positively, even before they reach the planning application stage.

Why is health important?
Being in good health, and the absence of ill health, means that people have good physical and mental
wellbeing. This allows people to take part in life, within our families, communities and wider society.

What are health inequalities?
Health inequalities are unfair and avoidable differences in health across the population, and between different groups within society. Health inequalities may arise from variations in income, education and the work people do. But crucially, they are also a result of the homes and neighbourhoods where people live, including their access to green space and healthy food.

Why is tackling health inequality important?
The reduction of health inequalities is a question of social justice as well as economic growth. The
cost of health inequalities can be measured in both human terms (lost years of life and active life)
and in economic terms (the cost to the economy of additional illness).

source :

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