Video Presentations: Future Health Threats and Wellness in Urban Habitat

Luke Leung
Principal
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Chicago

The world’s attention is consumed by COVID-19 currently, however, the current pandemic is only ranked third in terms of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Top 10 Threats to Global Health. By 2070, the world’s population over 60 years old will increase from 13 percent to 26 percent, and the total population will increase from 7.8 to 9.4 billion. The majority of these people will reside in urban habitats and many of them will be in tall buildings. Thus the question arises: how do we design for the holistic healthy future in tall buildings and urban environment? The objective is to fundamentally improve the underlying health of humans in the built environment in both normal and emergency (e.g. pandemic) situations through a set of high-level principles. These principles are: Human-Centric Health, Built Environment Health, and Terrestrial Health. Examples are provided, focusing on issues like air quality and land use before and after the Industrial Revolution, and its relationship to determining how the concentration of air particles in different spaces can be incorporated into safeguarding against future health threats.