Grant: Project Grant

Urban health aims to generate evidence regarding the impacts of social and built environments on population health outcomes. Today's need for climate change mitigation, adaptation, and resilience strategies points to interventions that do also improve urban conditions, health and equity. But issues concerning the assessment of causality limit our capacity to produce useful evidence and to support decision making. Complex systems perspectives that better integrate equity can provide more useful evidence - and tools - for decision making. Participatory processes, useful to tap into hands-on knowledge and to promote fairness and representation of voices, are currently underused, but are well-adapted to tackle built environment and urban planning interventions thanks to their ability to mobilise a diversity of local knowledge from city dwellers. The overall aim of this proposal is to develop and apply a combination of complex systems modeling and simulation approaches to analyse the urban health dynamics relating to climate change mitigation, adaptation and resilience, with a focus on transportation, greening and social cohesion. With a group of partners, we will 1) Improve our complex system understanding of the three topics mentioned above using participatory methods towards group model building such as concept mapping and causal loop diagrams; 2) Model urban health dynamics using fuzzy cognitive mapping and agent-based modelling, using the mental models developed in objective 1, and existing cohort databases to which we have access. The outputs will also include online tools for knowledge exchange and a blueprint for the scaling up and out of the tools and methods used.