With 55% of the world’s population living in urban areas, there are a total of more than 4 billion urban dwellers on the Planet Earth. Healthy equity for urban and urban population have become a top agenda item for government agencies, the academic, and the public. Urban health equity seeks to provide equal opportunities for all urban population to live the healthiest life possible. American Public Health Association holds health equity as a guiding priority and core value. To understand better the status of and the challenges for building urban health equity, geospatial technologies are commonly used for data analysis and visualization. However, the non-spatial aspects of health equity are neglected from time to time. While an urban area is a space concept and feature, a community is a population-centered entity; it consists of a group of people with diverse characteristics and their shared perspective, culture, and social ties. Building urban health equity must go beyond a narrow space-focused approach to account for the many aspects that are essential for people who may or may not live in a shared physical urban space but who have shared perspectives through their social, cultural, race /ethnicity, religious ties and backgrounds. This paper will advocate community-based approach for examining, understanding, and promoting urban health equity. It will adopt a community lens and connect urban health equity to precision community health and geospatial targeting approaches. The presentation will include discussions of some urban health issues and the related analyses in selected American cities.
Mots clés : community lens|community|precision community health|geospatial targeting
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