Article
The Inclusion of Health in County Comprehensive Planning
Sang Chul Park1, Christopher Coutts2, Se-Jin Lee3
1Sang Chul Park is an assistant professor in the Department of Public Administration at Yeungnam University. His research interests include the intergovernmental relation, smart and sustainable development, health and urban policy and official development assistance. E-mail:
scpark@ynu.ac.kr.
2Chris Coutts is an associate professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at Florida State University. His research interests include planning for healthy and resilient communities, human settlements and institutions in the context of global change. E-mail:
ccoutts@fsu.edu.
3Se Jin Lee, corresponding author, is a Ph.D from the Askew School of Public Administration and Policy at Florida State University. Her research interests include hierarchical and local governance, environment and urban policy and intergovernmental relations. E-mail:
sejinl@hotmail.com.
© Copyright 2014 Graduate School of Public Administration, Seoul National University. This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Received: Feb 10, 2014; Revised: Mar 03, 2014; Revised: Mar 31, 2014; Accepted: Apr 02, 2014
Published Online: Apr 30, 2014
Abstract
This article explores what drives communities in United States to include health objectives in their comprehensive plans. By using a place-based approach, this model is able to take into account variables such as health status, social equity, political institutions, and built environment. The findings suggest that communities are more likely to adopt health as a goal based on their political institutional structure and environmental quality (e.g., air pollution) than based on health status and social equity factors. Therefore, communities are responding to poor health and heightened mortality per se but rather to environmental factors that are associated with poor health outcomes.
Keywords: Public health; comprehensive plans; place-based population health
