Assessment Of Urban Human Settlement Health Based On Health Distance Model

With the further development of Chinese urbanization, the urbanization rate of Chinesepermanent population has increased to over than50%. However, a series of human settlementissues, including urban air pollution, fresh water shortage, traffic congestion and employmentdifficulties, are arising due to the extremely fast urbanization process, which is resulted fromthe ignorance of Nature-Society-Economy system harmony while merely emphasizing oneconomic development. United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and World HealthOrganization (WHO) are developing both theoretical and practical methods about healthurbanization globally. Primary human settlement problems facing us are to be researched andsolved. It is a demanding requirement for researchers to propose new urbanization conceptsduring the long process of Chinese urbanization.Based on the analysis of domestic and international research work about human settlement,healthy city, ecologic city, the concept of urban human settlement healthiness is proposed inthis paper. From the view of system theory, we utilize the causality theory DPSIRM model(Driving-Pressure-State-Impact-Response-Management) to build the city healthinessevaluation criteria. Health distance model that is usually used to describe ecology system isimproved and adjusted to be applicable in the evaluation of urban human settlement, firstly.Take the example of Dalian city, we evaluate the urban settlement health degree in recentdecade. The evaluation result is compared to that of traditional fuzzy comprehensive evaluationmethod and the following conclusions are achieved:(1)The variation trends of urban settlement health degree of Dalian city from2002to2011are similar from the two evaluation methods. Due to the different statistic methods, thehealth value attained from health distance model is generally higher than that attained fromfuzzy comprehensive evaluation method.(2)The human settlement health states of countries in Dalian City are distributed in aradial law. And it is becoming serious as the location form the downtown to the rural areas.(3)Urban human settlement heath distance of Dalian city from2002to2011is decreasingyear after year, except2003. In detail, the health distances average value of each layer in thisdecade are Pressure, Management, Driving, State, Impact and Response, in the order ofdeceasing. It shows the causality relationship of DPSIRM criteria layers in some degree.Furthermore, effectiveness of the proposed model is proved by: criteria ‘Impact’ has the most significant improving tendency among improvements of all the criteria layers since2004, alsofrom when Dalian began a city program of ‘health city’.