Action planning for healthy cities: the role of multi-criteria analysis, developed in Italy and France, for assessing health performances in land-use plans and urban development projects

In the last decades a growing attention has been paid to the relationship between urban planning and public health. The introduction of the social model of health has stressed the importance of the determinants of health such as socioeconomic, cultural, and environmental conditions, in addition to living and working conditions. Starting from the assumption that urban planning plays a crucial role for enhancing healthy lifestyles and environments, the paper describes two different approaches to include health issues into land use plans and urban development projects. Two different evaluation tools, defined according to the Italian and French legal framework, have been compared in order to find out whether they could be considered as an innovative answer to the instance of creating a more effective cross field of work and training among urban planners and public health professionals.