Making Healthy Places: NSW Built Environment Practitioners' Perspectives on Place-making Opportunities that Help Deliver Health and Wellbeing Outcomes

The built environment can positively impact the health and wellbeing of individuals and communities. Where you live shapes how easy it is to buy healthy food, use active transport, and make social connections. The evidence is clear. But how do we go about creating places that help deliver positive health and wellbeing outcomes for all? There is a longstanding recognition that strategic policy and health promotions fall short in the implementation of healthy placemaking. As such there is an ongoing question about how to bridge the gap between the rhetoric of current healthy planning principles and the reality of what is being delivered and managed by practitioners on the ground. Work to achieve environments that are supportive of human health is as old as the human endeavour itself. It is also apparent that this work has been characterised by an on-going dynamic of convergence and divergence between those individuals, professional groups, organisations and governance structures responsible for health and those responsible for urban planning and construction. It is possible to identify a range of contemporary and positive convergent processes within NSW (Part 3: below). However, it is also possible to identify concurrent divergent processes arising from competing interests at state and local government, a potential to deal with health-supportive environments indirectly through other more politic initiatives, and lingering difficulties with professional communication and different standards of accepted ‘evidence’ needed to justify action. In addition, although in Australia the health profession has high standing, built environment professions do not have the same level of acceptance. It presents a lingering difficulty in integrating health (or often any other matter) into new urban policies. This project looks at such convergences and divergences within a particularly instrumental environment – the barriers and opportunities that present to built environment practitioners when making healthy places