Grant: Planning/Dissemination Grants - IPPH - ICS - Building Healthy Cities - General

The INTervention Research Across Cities Team (INTERACT) was funded by CIHR in 2016, (1) to assess the impact of urban change on population level physical activity, social participation and well-being; and (2) to create and share methods that support urban health research, working with a multidisciplinary network of academics and knowledge users to guide future interventions for healthier and more equitable Canadian cities. This grant will help us plan the extension of the INTERACT framework towards a comprehensive National Healthy Cities Intervention Research Program. This extension will include concepts, tools and methods related to additional important environmental dimensions of healthy cities that are not yet part of the current INTERACT framework; for example, the impact of urban change on air quality, noise, and food environments, and on related health outcomes and health inequalities. We will also develop an online platform to deploy tools and methods within the 25 most populated cities in Canada. The built environment has been associated with various health behaviour including physical activity, social participation, and well-being. It is also related to air quality, noise and local food environments, which have been linked to various non-communicable diseases. The massive investments planned by the federal and provincial government in infrastructure and urban change projects, give us a unique opportunity to conduct natural experiments and generate robust new evidence that can guide future decisions to create healthy equitable cities. We plan to revise the INTERACT conceptual framework, reach out to key academic experts and knowledge users covering additional areas of expertise and consult with the larger Canadian community of researchers working on healthy cities, their network of knowledge users, and citizens to develop a comprehensive conceptual representation supporting a shared vision of a pan-Canadian healthy cities intervention research program.