Abstract
Although aspiration towards quality of life and holistic health has been growing faster in our modern society and the affordance of health in built environment has been more acknowledged, there has been hardly any development on built environment planning and design theory that can be comfortably and confidently used in creating built environment to promote holistic health. Thereby, this study sets out to experimently formulate a composite theory that explains the relationship between health and built environment. The main methodology of this study is literature review and analysis. Theories that have been applied in other similar fields were chosen to be analyzed by health related perspectives and graft those theories onto holistic health viewpoints to compose a comprehensive theory. Selected theories that were considered useful to be analyzed were Lawton's Environment Press Theory, Carp & Carp's Complementary & Congruence Theory, Valins' Activity-based Design Criteria Theory, Atchley's Continuity Theory, Murtha & Lee's User Benefit Criteria Theory, and Alexander's Pattern Language Theory. Characteristics of these theories were compared by their abstractness and concreteness, and the range of application, and analyzed by a holistic health perspective. Then, these theories were comprehensively structuralized and synthesized as a built environment for health theory. This study has its significance in providing a base to develop healthy built environment research further as it introduced a conceptual framework which explains spatial elements in the health functionality point of view.
