Alliance for Healthy Cities Global Conference; Equity assessments in Tehran

I participated briefly in the Alliance Global Conference to give a paper on our EcCowell approach. Several papers were interesting from an equity and integrated planning perspective including one from Tehran on an equity assessment called Urban Heart (Health Equity Assessment and Response Tool) which is now widely applied across Asia, Latin America, parts of Africa and elsewhere, but not in Europe or North America.

Heart was initially developed in Kobe to follow up on WHO work on the social determinants of health. It was applied across 22 districts in Tehran in 2009 with Heart 2 then being refined and applied across 374 neighbourhoods in Tehran. This has enabled areas of most disadvantage to be mapped across the city.

Heart 2 involves 70 indicators within  17 categories and 6 policy domains. These overlap with our interests in equity in such areas as literacy and education, social capital, disability, urban governance, and cultural aspects (respect to values). The sampling included blocks within neighbourhoods so that there is a strong locality flavour to this assessments. I* see this equity mapping of neighbourhoods as relevant to the theme for our Hong Kong conference, and it may be something to follow up on. Beilefeld has done a similar mapping of neighbourhoods from their 2012 Learning Report. UNESCO may wish to monitor in terms of their GLCN index. Tehran was overall interesting at the conference with a further paper on neighbourhood based community involvement addressing social development in a megacity. All this confirms my view that we need to align Learning City, Healthy City, and Green city development and develop some connections

I met a useful health contact from Hong Kong in Professor Lee from the Peggy Larn Health Promotion and Education Centre who is Chairman of the Health Promotion Committee. I will write to Professor Lee to follow up for our PASCAL Hong Kong conference.

With best wishes

Peter