ABSTRACT
Several aspects of the home environment are critical for health and wellbeing across the life course. Poor housing has often been the focus of public health interventions and indeed the nineteenth century’s focus on poor sanitation and infectious diseases has resulted in dramatic improvements of basic housing conditions in middle- and high-income countries. In more recent decades, however, the burden of disease in these countries has increasingly been dominated by chronic conditions, some of which – such as asthma – can be exacerbated by poor indoor environmental quality. Within this context, children can be a particularly vulnerable population group. However, there is increasing evidence supporting the need for a fundamental shift to housing and health: besides avoiding health risks, housing design and management must foster wellbeing. This chapter presents the latest evidence and knowledge gaps on the impact of environmental quality in housing on children’s health, reflecting upon design implications at the building and urban scale and arguing that a number of synergies and trade-off must be carefully considered to future-proof the housing stock.
