As safe as houses? Why standards for urban development matter
Open accessAbstract
Standards for designing, improving, and maintaining the built environment have conceptual and practical value for health. Yet, their importance runs the risk of being subsumed in tangential discourses, including over their applicability for particular populations or in particular contexts. This paper applies an integrative systems perspective to several relevant scenarios, while broadly revisiting the health rationale for built environment standards. As with any intervention, standards can have negative unintended consequences, in some cases inducing adverse outcomes. Yet, forgoing standards is not an acceptable answer for sustainable urbanization. The systems perspective adopted here surveys some of the driving forces that underlie adverse outcomes, and suggests potential leverage points and criteria for action.
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Despite evidence on aspects of frameworks, the overall effectiveness of guidelines, building codes, and national regulations in improving health and well-being is not clearly established and remains an important research area.
“Despite evidence on aspects of frameworks, the overall effectiveness of guidelines (69), building codes, and national regulations in improving health and well-being is not clearly established and remains an important research area (170).”
From Review of the Impact of Housing Quality on Inequalities in Health and Well-Being (2023) · cites this paper as [170]
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
The citation lists haven’t been fetched yet
References 32 · Cited by 10
Research works printed but not linked: 10
- Asgul, E., 2016. Incremental housing: A participation process solution for informal housing. ITU A|Z, 13 (1), 15–27.
- Bierre, S., Bennett, M., and Howden-Chapman, P., 2014. Decent expectations? The interpretation of housing quality standards in tenancy tribunals in New Zealand. New Zealand universities law journal, 26
- Gatzweiler, F.W., et al., Eds, 2016. Advancing health and well-being in the changing urban environment: implementing a systems approach. Bejing: Zhejiang University Press/ Springer.
- Kuhl, F.M., Negreiros, I., and Abiko, A., 2015. Analise de Indicadores de Sustentabilidade Urbana Relevantes ao Retrofit Urbano. Proceedings – Abstracts and Extended Papers, IV Interdisciplinary Workshop on Research and Sustainability Indicators, Concepción, Chile, 183–189.
- O'Neill, R., 2009. Green construction is no safer. Hazards Magazine, 22, April. Box presented in Ofori, G. (ed.) Contemporary Issues in Construction in Developing Countries. Spon: Abingdon, p. 198, 2012.
- O'Hagan, A., 2018. The tower. London review of books, 7 (June), 3–43. Owens, K., Gulyani, S., and Rizvi, A., 2018. Success when we deemed it failure? Revisiting sites and services projects in
- Rajendran, S., Gambatese, J., and Behm, M., 2009. Impact of green building design and construction on worker safety and health. Journal of construction engineering and management, 135 (10), 1058–1066. doi: 10.1061/(ASCE)0733- · DOI
- UN Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III), 2019. Adopted Draft of the New Urban Agenda, 17–20 October, Quito.
- Werna, E. and Simas, R., 1996. Uneasy flexibility in legislation: their effects on crowding, density and health in Brazil. Trialog, 3 (50), 32–37.
- WHO (World Health Organization), 2010. Report of the International Workshop on Housing, Health and Climate Change: Developing guidance for health protection in the built environment - mitigation and adaptation responses, 13–15 October. Geneva: WHO.
- Authors
- Werna, E., Siri, J. G., Tan, D. T., & Howden-Chapman, P.
- Affiliations
- International Labour Office, United Nations, Geneva, Switzerland
- Wellcome Trust (GB)
- United Nations University-International Institute for Global Health (MY)
- Housing and Health Research Programme & New Zealand Centre for Sustainable Cities, University of Otago, Wellington, New Zealand
- Corresponding author
- Werna, Edmundo
- Venue
- Cities & Health
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 2020-06-09
- Volume
- 6
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 404-417
- ISSN
- 2374-8834 (ISSN-L)
- 2374-8842
- OpenAlex
- W3035322230
- Cited by
- 10
- References
- 32
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 1 · 2024: 1 · 2023: 2 · 2022: 2 · 2021: 1 · 2020: 1
- FWCI
- 1.34
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- Licence
- cc-by
- Locations
- Cities & Health (publishedVersion)
- Research Open (London South Bank University) (acceptedVersion, cc-by)
- Funders
- No funders (No grant)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Transportation › Urban Transport and Accessibility
- Social Sciences › Urban Studies › Urban and Rural Development Challenges
- Health Sciences › Health Professions › General Health Professions › Public Health Policies and Education
- Keywords
- urban development, urban health, sustainable urbanization, unintended consequences, systems approach, leverage points
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
