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Housing conditions affect occupants continuously, and health interventions have shown the positive association between housing investment and improvement in occupant health. Yet only rarely do we hear of the public's own perception of housing improvement internationally. The purpose of this paper is to explore public views on the importance of housing issues, from a worldwide perspective, in analysis of the global survey.

Data were analyzed from the World Values Survey, 2005-2007, the most recent public data sets including demographics, self-rated health status, and beliefs on different social and political issues. Participants were those aged 15 and above. Analyses included χ2 and logistic regression modeling.

Less wealthy countries had the most people who considered housing improvement as top priority. Regions with more than 20,000 residents and lower scale of income levels were linked with higher proportions of people considering housing improvement as top priority. Additionally, people who reported very poor self-rated health tended to view housing improvement as top priority, compared to those who reported very good self-rated health.

Public consensus is that there is an urgent need for housing improvement globally. Effective housing strategies and interventions optimizing population health, well-being, and quality of life are suggested.

To the author's knowledge, this is the first study investigating public opinion on the importance of housing issues using a global, cross-sectional, population-based study for international comparison. Understanding the need on housing improvement from the general public would indicate possible policy reform in the coming decades.

Contemporary urban design has tried to account for the satisfaction of the human experience and climate change which might encompass several disciplines. However, from a methodological perspective, a systematic research approach is still lacking. Therefore, this paper aims to propose a universal research method embedded into early urban design phase with an example.

A case study was used under the concept of DIDID Action Plan, which was proposed to integrate systematic research into urban design projects in the early phase with a focus on health and well-being. Moreover, design mapping skills tackling health risks at the population level were discussed.

This proposal of DIDID Action Plan has provided inclusive steps for future urban design projects with a systematic approach, in particular for health and well-being aspect. DIDID denotes five planning stages, namely, dream, initiation, design, implementation and delivering. With the advancement of urbanisation and technology, more emphasis would be placed on health and well-being to delay chronic diseases by targeting risk contributors and to increase citizens’ quality of life and human life experience, although stopping the breakout of unexpected communicable diseases and disasters would also need to be considered from time to time as well.

Systematic research to be integrated into early urban design phase could potentially avoid issues such as re-design and save manpower time and costs.

This proposal is the first to provide a universal research method for early urban design phase with a focus on health and well-being.