Thesis (M.Sc.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Urban and Regional Planning - Department of Urban Design

This research can be considered a major step for achieving the vision of Healthy Communities. World health problems such as obesity, mental ill-health, increasing health inequalities, and lack of physical activity cannot be fixed by medications, but by improving the social, economic and environmental spheres. The field of urban planning is crucial. As planners, we should begin to include consideration of this issue, as we still tend to see health and well-being as a secondary subject, or even irrelevant to our strategies. It is pivotal that all those who are concerned with the built environment take urgent decisions to tackle the problem of unhealthy human environments. In different ways, we are quite literally creating unhealthy circumstances inside human settlements, although enhancing the healthy environment is not considered an opposition to economic development, rather it is viewed as an essential condition for increased creativity and productivity. However, having overcome the prevalent communicable diseases, partly throughout better town planning, there is now an increasing economic burden from non-communicable diseases. Relying heavily on health care to treat these matters is to misjudge their origins, and is to misunderstand economic realities

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