Environmental health, environmental protection and their relationship with spatial planning

The roles of the spatial planning, environmental protection and public health regimes are interconnected and to an extent complementary. All are involved with a range of similar issues and share the aims of achieving more sustainable communities by protecting the environment and health, preventing and mitigating nuisance or loss of amenity, and facilitating healthier lifestyles. The links between the built environment and health are long established, with advances in public health in western societies having been extensively driven by improvements undertaken since the nineteenth century in sanitation, housing conditions, air and water quality. The current planning, environmental health and building control professions all sprang from the Public Health Acts of the Victorian era indicating the fundamental relationship between these functions and the impacts their roles have on the quality of the built and natural
environment.