Competitive Smart Cities through Healthy Decision-Making

Introduction

This chapter looks at a new method of how to achieve competitive and healthy smart cities. There are a number of future city visions that contain different focuses on health such as competitive cities, smart cities, healthy cities, resilient cities, knowledge cities, creative cities, green cities and ubiquitous cities. For example, excellent health service delivery, healthy built environments and a high level of health in the population are integral to achieving competitive cities. This is because the qualities that reflect health can make a ‘location’ more attractive and, therefore, competitive in comparison to global standards. Smart cities, on the other hand, focus on developing urban systems integrated through technology, which leads to the achievement of healthier cities by enabling improved health qualities. Therefore health is an outcome of creating a smart city. For the past few decades, there has been emerging evidence of a close relationship between health and place. This is displayed in the Healthy Cities movement (WHO, 1999) which reflects the amount of work going into creating environments that promote both health and wellbeing. Healthy Cities was officially introduced in 1986 by Ilona Kickbusch at a conference of the World Health Organisation (WHO) in Copenhagen, Denmark. This movement has been very popular with over 3000 cities, towns and villages joining the movement from 1985 to 2010 (Healthy Cities Illawarra, 2010). Johnson argues that a healthy community is a critical component of a competitive city (Johnson, 2002). Smart cities include “important ingredients for a healthier environment and for improved quality of life and well-being of city dwellers” (Boulos & Al-Shorbaji, 2014, p.5).

There is evidence that planners require a new approach to enable them to respond to this agenda. Specifically, they need timely access to local information, collaborative planning processes and mechanisms for engaging the public in decision-making. The WHO has concluded that e-Health systems hold great promise for both low- and high-income countries. The benefits of an online approach to health planning apply not only to effective and efficient health-care delivery, but also to public health governance, finance, education, research, and health-related economic activities (WHO, 2008). The purpose of this chapter is to examine an online approach to planning that can respond to the call for healthy, smart and competitive cities. In this chapter, we will first review competitive cities in the context of health. Then we will review smart cities in the context of health. Next, the chapter will explore e-health decision support systems in the context of collaborative health planning practice. This will be followed by the conceptual framework for planning healthy, smart and competitive cities. Lastly, we will introduce a participatory model for implementing collaborative health planning and apply the conceptual framework in practice. In summary, we conclude that e-health Geographical Information System (GIS) based Decision Support System (DSS) can contribute to the development of healthy, smart and competitive cities, particularly if the challenges presented by an online environment can be addressed.