Health Impact Assessment (HIA) of New Towns on Their Residents (Case study: Sadra New Town)

The creation of new towns has profound effects on various aspects of human life and ecosystems due to the huge volume of activities carried out, the resources consumed and the significant population group that it attracts. In contemporary urban planning, many of these effects of projects and developments on people’s health have been ignored, while today human health and the environment are the focus of sustainable development. Therefore, it is necessary to evaluate these projects in terms of their effects on various aspects of citizens’ lives, especially their health. In recent years, the appropriate method to do this is to “Health Impact Assessment”. Health impact assessment is a combination of procedures, methods and tools by which a policy, program or project is judged in terms of its potential impacts on the health of a community, and the distribution of these effects within the population is also examined. In Iran, according to paragraph (b) of clause (32) of the Law on the Fifth Strategic Development Plan, the preparation of a national health annex is required for large development projects, such as the creation of new towns. Therefore in this research, Sadra New town project has been evaluated for health impacts. The main purpose of this study is to identify the factors affecting the health of Sadra residents and to investigate the possible impacts (positive or negative) of these factors on health and the severity of the impact of each of these factors. For this purpose, by examining the indicators extracted from the literatures and using the exploratory factor analysis method, health factors in Sadra city were identified and after identifying these factors in the form of prioritized factors, the positive or negative impacts of each using the opinions of Sadra town residents in the form of a questionnaire was used with the help of univariate t-test. The results showed that all the variables of the 12 factors extracted from the exploratory factor analysis test, except for the two variables “air quality” and “water quality” have negative effects on health.