Healthy Cities Generator
Explore the healthiest options for your city.
The Healthy Cities Generator is a freely available digital tool, designed to make it easy for urban planners, health professionals and policy makers to incorporate health factors into urban planning and urban factors into health policy.
With this practical, evidence-based tool, users can understand the health impact of urban planning, and see how small adjustments could make a big difference to the lives of local people.
From the planning perspective, the user can enter their own planning actions or characteristics of an existing area, and immediately visualise the specific health effects on 30 health indicators (physical, mental & environmental health).
For health, the tool includes an assessment to help citizens and practitioners understand their areas’ strengths and weaknesses, and guides the user to planning & social actions that will improve their health results.
Want to learn more? Check out our Urban Determinants of Health and our Health Impacts of Urban Determinants.
You can create your own login through the platform or test the tool with the following credentials:
Project ID: demo
Password: demo
1. Explore the tool
2. Learn how it works
Who is it for?
Urban planners
Assess and improve urban plans at city or neighbourhood scale, helping the planner understand the urban determinants they need to address.
Health professionals
Model and understand the interventions required to meet their health goals, encouraging cross-departmental collaboration.
Decision-makers
See and compare the effect of planning actions on citizen health, make investment decisions, communicate their vision for the future and prioritise the right actions.
Citizens
Engage citizens with workshops to co-develop their ideal healthy city and assess residents needs and desires.
Local government
Bring together different government departments and facilitate collaborative working to integrate health in all policies.
Innovation projects
Assess the impact of nature-based solutions, active mobility interventions, and greening initiatives on citizen health.
The Generator's Journey
At Healthy Cities, it’s essential that our work and tool are based on evidence: drawn from both science and healthy planning practice. We are driven to continuously improve our approach as new evidence becomes available.
Discover how our work has evolved over the years – from our planning practice and initial research to a healthy urban planning movement.
An initial systematic review of the literature (Puig-Ribera and Rofin, et al., 2017) identified significant associations between urban planning attributes and health outcomes. This research fed into a checklist to help urban planners incorporate evidence-based planning actions into their plans. Our founder put this knowledge into practice in an award-winning masterplan that put health at the heart of its design.
The Healthy Cities team brought the review up to date with a meta-analysis (publication forthcoming) of studies from 2017-2021. The results showed additional links between urban planning and health, expanding the urban planning attributes to 20 and associated health outcomes to 30. We further expanded our knowledge through research assignments for British and Spanish government agencies and validated the results with international experts.
We carried out scoping research into the state of the art in healthy urban planning tool design. Our analysis found that most existing easy-to-use tools are limited in scope or depth, whereas holistic tools tend to be complex and time-consuming (paper under review in Perspectives in Public Health). The Healthy Cities Generator was designed to fill this gap, providing a simple, interactive, holistic tool to help plan healthy cities.
Building on the research, our team created an algorithm to underpin the first online iteration of the tool. To make this resource accessible to practitioners, we designed a user-friendly application that automatically scores the health impacts of an urban plan or existing space. Later, after research for government health agencies, we added the health entry point: where you can select your health goals to guide your planning strategy.
The initial tool was put to the test in cities across Europe, including with the nine municipalities in the URBACT Healthy Cities Action Planning Network. These pilots showed the value of a rigorous health impact assessment tool that draws on healthy planning evidence and engages local communities. Lessons learnt on the tool’s design and content fed into the continual evolution of the Healthy Cities Generator.
Throughout the development process, we held a series of roundtables with international and local experts in health and planning to validate the research and ensure the Generator fulfilled the needs of practitioners. These contributions were extremely valuable for increasing the quality and credibility of the tool, but also to better explain the tool and underlying concepts. New users from various professional backgrounds and geographies brought fresh perspectives, improving the tool and our approach.
Our team is continuously improving the tool with new research and functionalities to deepen topics (such as social impact of urban planning) and adapt it to specific needs (mobility, greening, housing, etc), as well as to tailor it to local context and languages. The tool is freely available for all to use, and we continue to invest in maintenance and upgrades, because we are committed to putting health at the heart of evidence-based urban planning.
Alongside the Healthy Cities Generator, we launched Healthy Cities Lab (research and training) and Healthy Cities Action (bridging knowledge with action) to expand our work beyond the tool. Examples of our Healthy Cities Lab work include research assignments exploring the wider health and planning landscape, and delivering training sessions in healthy city planning to local authorities. For Healthy Cities Action, we have used our expertise in the areas to design urban health strategies and create healthy urban plans.
Contributors
