Grant: IPPH Building Healthy Cities - Dragon's Den

Cities are constantly changing. For example, new cycling lanes are put in place, new trees are planted in parks, and new highways are built. All these decisions and investments in our cities can be seen as opportunities to create neighbourhoods that contribute to people's and communities' health. Positive urban changes can make our society more just, and more sustainable, so that future generations will have a good quality of life. Our project aims to help us design cities that will contribute to these goals of improved health, equity, and sustainability. Our approach has six steps. For each step, we consider concepts and theories that can help us think about these issues, tools and methods to help us find solutions, and a number of outputs or products. The aims of the six steps are as follows: 1) Understand how decisions changing the city are made, including citizens' and decision makers' vision for the future ; 2) Improve our measure of how the urban environments actually change, data that is needed to see how these changes have an impact on people, 3) measure individual and community health and differences in health between social groups, 4) From data collected in 2 and 3, create meaningful indicators that will feed statistical models to be developed in 5) where we will establish which changes to the urban environment have positive effects on health and equity, and finally, 6) Share these discoveries and develop a simulation tool that will allow decision makers to test different scenarios on how they could change the city. All this work is organised by a large group of researchers, community organizations and decision makers who have already joined forces in an existing team called INTERACT. This proposal is extending this work so that it can be applied to various cities, contexts, and health outcomes.