A recent examination of the significant role of public health has prompted calls to re-investigate how the urban environment affects public health. A vital part of the solution includes Healthy City initiatives that have been the subject of extensive policies, implications, and practices globally. However, the existing literature mainly focuses on big cities and metropolitan areas, while investigations into small and midsized cities (SMCs) are lacking, and thus reflect the underlying issues of health inequity. This study develops an indicator system for evaluating Healthy City initiatives in SMCs, linking urban design and public health, supported by the analyzed opinions from experts collected using both questionnaires and interviews. The indicator system includes six primary dimensions and 37 variables: urban form and transportation (UFT); health-friendly service (HFS); environmental quality and governance (EQG); community and facility (CF); green and open space (GOS); and ecological construction and biodiversity (ECB). A fuzzy synthetic evaluation technique was used to assess the relative importance of factors, emphasizing the importance of UFT, HFS, and EQG, with importance indexes of 0.175, 0.174, and 0.174, respectively. This indicator system is helpful for SMCs seeking to construct a Healthy City in the future, and is based on urban design and governance inputs and for enhancing the Healthy City knowledge base of cities of varied scales.

For cities facing post-industrial transition, urban greenways are proven strategies to activate urban spaces and improve the sustainability of cities. However, significant challenges remain when seeking to link greenways as a greenway network and integrate greenway networks to urban spaces. Given this shortcoming, Yantai National Economic and Technical Development Zone (YEDZ) was selected as a representative case. This paper analyzed the potential role of greenway network and requirements of post-industrial development for the urban environment. It seeks to develop a regeneration approach that integrating urban greenway planning with overall urban reform. Our priorities are providing a pedestrian network with non-utilitarian rhythms by activating former industrial spaces, restructuring urban green spaces, and integrating greenway networks into diverse urban spaces. In this way, it reveals the comprehensive benefits of the urban greenway network and improves overall urban form - multiple benefits, including economic development and social rewards, be created in the regeneration.

Healthy City policies are often enforced based on expert assessments, which calls for research on the presence and occurrence of mismatches between experts’ and public opinions. Additionally, the unique challenges in small and midsized cities (SMCs) are often ignored. In this study, we compared the values of experts and the public on achieving a healthy SMC. A survey with both experts and public participants was conducted. An explorative factor analysis (EFA) and fuzzy synthetic evaluation (FSE) were adopted to identify the key factors and their importance hierarchy. Both the experts and the public highlight the importance of Environmental Quality and Governance/Service (EQ). More attention could be given to public participation and urban form to reflect the public’s perceptions better, as they prioritized these factors more than the experts did. Both similarities and mismatches between experts and the public were revealed in this study, indicating that more studies are necessary to understand heterogeneous values and achieve mutual understanding. Thus, public participation and involvement are recommended to construct a Healthy City for more comprehensive benefits. Our results also offer valuable insights from the public to plan Healthy Cities in the future, avoiding reactive decision making.