Grant: Team Grant: Environments and Health: Intersectoral Prevention Research - LOI

How our cities are built can have an impact on people's health. For example, planning decisions implementing urban parks may favor physical activity or social connections in neighbourhoods, or implementations of new traffic calming measures may reduce car use, increase bicycle use and walking, and indirectly lower obesity rates. Increasingly, non-health sectors are therefore considered important partners for improving population health. Whereas there is a great potential to include health preoccupations in these other domains, working together towards common goals of improved health and sustainability is not easy. Our project, called INTERACT (INTErventions, Research and Action in Cities Team), aims to answer to some of these challenges, by helping understand how changes in the way we design our cities have an impact on health, inequalities in health, and sustainability. Furthermore, our work will generate new tools and methods that will help city decision makers and stakeholders work collaboratively. We will use a variety of advanced research methods and rely on existing cohorts across Canada and internationally to explore these questions. Our team is composed of researchers and knowledge users from different sectors involved in planning, transportation and health, working at various levels, including local, municipalities, regions, and provinces, and internationally.