A systematic review of planning policies for community wellbeing

With more than half of the world’s population living in cities, a growing body of research is showing the role of urban environments in promoting the wellbeing of communities. This paper conducted a systematic review of 28 planning policy documents from 6 different countries. It explored how ‘community wellbeing’ is defined by local governments across the world and identified thirteen domains. Findings indicated that the scope of understanding of community wellbeing varies across different local governments, particularly in relation to the type of council (metropolitan and non-metropolitan). The position of policy within the broader local government strategic direction and the context-specific opportunities and challenges of local communities were also important to the definition of community wellbeing. Only about half of the policies we reviewed employed community wellbeing indicators, which play an important role in the research-practice transition and developing evidence-informed policies.