Healthy urban rehabilitation through social innovatio

Hong Kong has no clear policy and guideline for urban rehabilitation that advocates health benefits. Urban rehabilitation could tackle housing and health problems together and build a healthier, inclusive and sustainable society. In order to maximise its benefits, Hong Kong’s urban rehabilitation requires a change in the interaction between actors and policies, procedures, behaviours, and ways of working.

We are developing a new “healthy urban rehabilitation through social innovation” approach, using co-production by active stakeholder engagement to plan and implement urban rehabilitation. This project actively engages residents, housing professionals and developers, designers, public health practitioners, and other stakeholders using a co-production method. A successful co-production process can include methods in which experts, lay people, and people with unique local knowledge are engaged to jointly understand the challenges they faced and the potential of the options they considered. The stakeholders can jointly contribute through four key co-production modes: co-commissioning, co-design, co-delivery and co-evaluation, to discover new mutually beneficial options and work out creative solutions to the challenges.

Through this project, we develop an evidence-based framework for healthy urban rehabilitation, identify the contexts and institutional barriers, to create a co-production policy-making process for urban rehabilitation practice to maximise the benefits of residents’ health and wellbeing in Hong Kong.

This project is supported by the 44th round of the URC Postdoc Fellow/RAP Scheme (2020.07-2023.07), Natural Experiments in Built Environment and Elderly Health in High-Density Cities.