Healthy and Inclusive Neighbourhoods: A Design Research Toolkit for the Promotion of Healthy Behaviours

What needs to be underlined is that addressing health issues in urban contexts requires multidisciplinary approaches, where design is crucial in connecting public health and the built environment [52]. In this context, design thinking has been described as a method to develop urban health solutions based on the situated exploration of people (specifically, older people) [5]. This sounds similar to approaches such as active design [34,35,36], where creative design solutions provide stimuli and incentives for assuming healthy lifestyles and behaviours through physical activity, through the design of the built environment. The built environment, in terms of services and place proximity, can be interpreted through the caring concept. This is described in Manzini’s idea of the city that cares [53,54], which is based on proximity dimensions [55] and emerging models of the 15 min city [56,57]. In this context, the design for social innovation [58] plays a strategic role in developing the condition for enacting proximity in a city that cares [53]. The urban health literature also emphasises the importance of engaging local communities to both improve awareness and embed citizen voices. Some authors emphasize the importance of involving, empowering, and developing communities for health purposes by driving processes from both national/local health departments [59] and universities [60]. Involving citizen voices for healthy neighbourhood purposes is also a way to embed potentially excluded city voices [61], including traditionally uninvolved citizens, such as children (e.g., [62]), or as in co-design activities engaging stakeholders to work in an active ageing society (see [63]). Resources that promote guidelines and principles for building healthy places suggest carefully understanding citizen needs and the status of the environment before any intervention is made (e.g., [23,33,47]); a few provide toolkits on how to involve communities in the research and planning process (e.g., [48]). Design, in the form of co-design (thinking), plays a strategic role through practices for engaging communities, developing participatory action research processes, co-analysing data, and understanding mechanisms of change (e.g., [64,65]). Co-designing the neighbourhood’s built environment is a strategy in applying design to promote health. Indeed, the built environment has an impact on our behaviours, where design solutions can create the triggers for healthy or unhealthy choices [66], especially if a design for behaviour change [67] approach is adopted. Similarly, the ways of thinking which “nudge” (see [68]) through design can impact the way we make healthy or unhealthy choices through our behaviours. In this direction, disciplines such as product design may help to creatively impact the way urban furniture can promote health through factors that should focus on “physical exercise functions, communication seating facilities, ease of use and understanding, resting and sitting facilities, and facility structure” [4]. In general terms, design thinking is a strategic resource to be adopted for co-designing healthy neighbourhoods, and for emphatic problem solving in urban planning (e.g., [69]). From a general design research perspective, research through design (RTD) [70,71,72] may also help in assuming the design process as the epistemological medium to gain knowledge for the promotion of health through the built environment. However, the way in which gaining insights from a transdisciplinary design-led approach, to be transformed into situated design solutions for the urban health approach, remains unclear. We aim to contribute to the solutions for these issues by facilitating a relationship among multidisciplinary teams of designers, citizen needs, and situated problems, and by assuming a health design thinking lens. We argue that we need to apply “design research” tools to the discussed issues to address the complexities of health promotion through the built environment from several levels and disciplines, starting from the neighbourhood perspective.