A vision of healthy urban design for NCD prevention

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Non-communicable diseases (NCD), such as cancer, heart disease, type II diabetes mellitus, chronic respiratory conditions like asthma, and poor mental health, are some of the most common causes of death in the UK and Australia. The design of our cities play an important role in preventing these chronic diseases and have a significant consequent impact on the quality of life and life expectancy of their citizens. However, in a rapidly evolving urban age, urban designers, urban planners and public health practitioners still know surprisingly little about how best to design our cities in order to prevent NCD and their known risk factors. This proposal is innovative because we are harnessing perspectives of scientists from a wide range of different disciplines across urban design, public health and computer science. Through novel methods, we aim to provide better understanding of how the design of our cities impacts on NCD and their known risk factors in the UK and Australia, and how we can best effect change for the better.Our overarching aim is to generate evidence and tools to support the urban planning and health sectors to better understand how to design our cities to prevent NCD. We will also involve local citizens in discussions about our findings so they can effectively and powerfully advocate for change in their own cities. The research project has the following objectives:1. Use new methods in computer vision and artificial intelligence to explore the relation between urban design and NCD in cities across the UK and Australia.2. Investigate how different designs within cities impact on health inequalities including NCD.3. Combine data from different sources to investigate the mechanisms by which the design of our cities causes NCD.4. Learn lessons about how different ways of designing our cities prevent NCD and their known risk factors.5. Develop a toolkit for action for local citizens, urban designers and planners, public health practitioners and policy makers, to help inform future policies and lead to powerful, actionable changes in the city.6. To build a legacy of transdisciplinary research capacity in public health science, urban design and computer science, with clear pathways to impact.The project involves 3 work packages. The first involves building the evidence base on the relationship between urban design and NCD. This will be comprised of two levels of analysis: the city level and individual level. This acknowledges that people's health is affected by their immediate environment and, at same time, by the way the entire city is organised. This will help us better understand which features of the built environment are associated with city designs, NCD and their known risk factors, such as not being physically active, having poor diet, smoking, consuming alcohol and being exposed to air pollution. A further work package will then test changes to the design of our cities to analyse how they will help prevent NCD and reduce known risk factors. The findings will help inform future policies and practices leading to actionable changes in the design of our cities to make them healthier places for people to live. Finally, we will develop a toolkit that urban designers and planners, public health practitioners, students, policymakers and local citizens can use to advocate and lobby for actionable healthy changes to their cities. At the end of the study we will meet with experts from different fields of research, to help us further interpret our findings and discover how they might apply to other contexts and cities to prevent NCD.