Healthy Urban Places: a systems approach to understanding how to harness the power of local places to improve population health and reduce inequalities

Urban policy initiatives, such as ‘regeneration’ projects that involve investing in new local services and amenities and ‘place-based interventions’ that refurbish public parks and housing or aim to change how a specific street is used (e.g. street closure for outdoor play), can be used to improve population health through the engineering of urban places. However, there is limited evidence on what makes an urban place ‘healthy’, which can impact investments.

Much of the existing research on the impact of the environment and place on health focuses on one aspect at a time, e.g. air quality, but people are exposed to multiple different aspects of urban places, e.g. low air quality and reduced green space, at the same time. This has limited our understanding of how features within the environment can co-occur and how these may then impact on health.

This research project will use existing Born in Bradford datasets combined with additional open source and routinely linked data, to examine multiple aspects of the urban environment on population health in Bradford using advanced methodological approaches. It is part of a wider project together known as ‘Healthy Urban Places’ that also examines interventions, policy, and economic impacts of urban environments on health in Bradford and in Liverpool.

As part of this work, the lead researcher (Krenz) will be updating and expanding existing BiB, BiBBS, and BiB4All environmental geographic variables, as well as conducting analyses that allow the team to locate where certain parts of the environment occur on a geographical map.