The 1000 Cities Challenge: Scaling Up the Global Observatory of Healthy and Sustainable Cities

Purpose: To describe the goal and objectives, and science behind the Global Observatory of Healthy and Sustainable Cities; and to encourage ISPAH attendees to join the 1000 Cities Challenge.

Description: The Global Observatory of Healthy and Sustainable Cities (GOHSC) provides comparable, evidence-based spatial and policy indicators of healthy and sustainable urban design and planning for cities internationally to diagnose the extent to which their current status is promotive of health and sustainability, identify areas of improvement, set goals, and benchmark progress. Dr. Deborah Salvo, Co-Director of GOHSC, will chair this Symposium, and will open the session by providing an of the GOHSC and 1000 Cities Challenge Project – an initiative to upscale the GOHSC to include data and partners from over 1000 cities worldwide. This brief introduction will be followed by four 12-to-15-minute presentations. Presentations 1 and 2, by Dr. Melanie Lowe (Co-Director of the GOHSC and lead of the policy indicators team) and Dr. Geoff Boeing (spatial indicators team member, currently led by Carl Higgs), will describe the rationale and evidence behind the policy and spatial indicators included in the GOHSC, and the open access tools available for new members to join the 1000 Cities Challenge. Presentations 3 and 4, by Dr. Anna Puig-Ribera and Dr. César Hernández, will reflect on the lessons learned by two GOHSC members, who are applying spatial and policy indicators to multiple cities in their respective countries, Spain and Mexico. Dr. Jim Sallis, member of the Executive of GOHSC, will serve as a discussant. There will be about 20 minutes for facilitated discussion on opportunities to participate in the 1000 Cities Challenge at the end of the session.

Chair: Deborah Salvo, PhD. Associate Professor and Director of the People, Health and Place Lab, Department of Kinesiology and Health Education, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, USA.

Presenter 1: Melanie Lowe, PhD. Vice Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow, College of Design and Social Context, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies. RMIT Australia. Melbourne, Australia.

Presenter 2: Geoff Boeing, PhD. Assistant Professor, Department of Urban Planning and Spatial Analysis, University of Southern California. Los Angeles, USA.

Presenter 3: Anna Puig-Ribera, PhD. Professor of Physical Activity and Health Sciences, Department of Education, University of Vic-Central, Cataluña. Vic, Spain.

Presenter 4: César Hernández, PhD. Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Departmento de Actividad Física y Estilos de Vida Saludables, Centro de Investigación en Nutrición y Salud, Instituto Nacional de Salud Pública. Cuernavaca, México.

Discussant: James Sallis, PhD. Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of California in San Diego; and Professorial Fellow, Australian Catholic University. San Diego, USA; and Sydney, Australia. 

ABSTRACT 1 

Policy indicators of healthy and sustainable urban design and planning for the 1000 Cities Challenge

Melanie Lowe, Deepti Adlakha, James Sallis, Deborah Salvo, Eugen Resendiz, Ester Cerin, Anne Vernez Moudon, Carl Higgs, Erica Hinckson, Jonathan Arundel, Geoff Boeing, Shiqin Liu, Vuokko Heikinheimo, Billie Giles-Corti

Background: City planning policies influence health and sustainability by impacting urban lifestyles and exposure to health and environmental risks. Internationally relevant, evidence-informed urban policy indicators are useful for assessing and comparing whether cities have the policy frameworks in place to deliver healthy cities, and for monitoring progress over time.

Methods: For a 2022 Lancet Global Health series, we developed policy indicators to assess the presence and quality of policies associated with health and sustainability for 25 cities internationally. To upscale this study, our indicators are now available open access via our 1000 Cities Challenge, as part of the Global Observatory of Healthy and Sustainable Cities. Through expert consultation and literature review we developed a comprehensive policy indicator checklist tool for the 1000 Cities Challenge, which includes additional measures of sustainable and resilient land use and transport.

Results: Researchers, policymakers and advocates in cities worldwide are using our open access policy indicator checklist to assess policies for their city, and generate city scorecards and reports. The policy indicators can be applied to any jurisdiction, from whole metropolitan regions to smaller urban areas. The 1000 Cities Challenge indicator reports show policy gaps and limitations and highlight opportunities to strengthen policy frameworks for each city. The indicators also enable comparisons of policies between different cities.

Conclusions: We invite scholars, policymakers, practitioners, students and advocates to join the 1000 Cities Challenge, use our open access tools and become part of our global collaboration.

Practical Implications: This presentation will outline practical steps and benefits of applying the 1000 Cities Challenge’s policy indicators. The indicators and city reports generated can be used to inform local advocacy, and support urban policy and practice innovations towards healthy and sustainable cities. 

ABSTRACT 2

Analytics and Tools to Calculate Spatial Indicators of Healthy and Sustainable Cities for the 1000 Cities Challenge

Geoff Boeing, Carl Higgs, Shiqin Liu, Vuokko Heikinheimo, Billie Giles-Corti, James F Sallis, Ester Cerin, Melanie Lowe, Deepti Adlakha, Erica Hinckson, Anne Vernez Moudon, Deborah Salvo, Eugen Resendiz, Jonathan Arundel.

Background: Cities’ built environments shape human mobility, physical activity, sustainability, and planetary health. Creating healthier and more sustainable cities is a global priority integral to achieving sustainable development goals and health equity goals. Spatial indicators of relevant urban design and transport features can help planners target interventions and compare both between cities (benchmarking) and over time (monitoring) to measure progress toward these critical goals. However, most urban indicator frameworks use coarse spatial scales that only allow between-city comparisons or require expensive, technical, local spatial analyses for within-city comparisons.

Methods: We report our recent advances in using open data and open source tools worldwide, in conjunction with local collaborators, to model and measure urban design and transport features that support active travel behavior. We developed a reusable open-source urban indicator computational framework using open data to enable consistent local and global comparative analyses for the 1000 Cities Challenge.

Results: Our analytics can unlock new measures of health and sustainability around the world. Our pilot demonstration—for 25 diverse cities in 19 countries—produced these spatial indicators of urban design and transport features in conjunction with local collaborators for data gathering and validation. We also identified populations living above and below critical thresholds for physical activity through walking. The 1000 Cities Challenge reports then link these spatial outcomes to cities’ policy contexts to understand implementation gaps and support local advocacy.

Conclusions: These analytics can be run anywhere in the world to calculate local indicators of the built environment’s ability to support healthy and sustainable lifestyles.

Practical Implications: We present the software framework to run these analytics and invite collaborators to join us in the 1000 Cities Challenge to support evidence-informed planning for healthier and more sustainable cities.

ABSTRACT 3

Using evidence-based urban indicators and open science to promote active and sustainable cities in Spain

Anna Puig-Ribera, Xavier Delclòs-Alió, Marc Domínguez-Mallafré, Ana Queralt, Javier Molina-García. 

Background: Implementing urban policies to enhance accessibility, sustainability and active mobility is a key issue for promoting urban health. To maximise the effectiveness of urban policies on the achievement of environmental, social, and health-related benefits, there is a need for high quality evidence-based data to guide and inform policymakers on the design, implementation, and evaluation of urban interventions. We examined to what extent several cities in Spain present sustainable and healthy urban designs and policies.

Methods: The Global Healthy and Sustainable City Indicators (GHSCI) Software (1) calculated a set of spatial indicators relative to accessibility and urban design in the ten largest Spanish cities, (2) initiated the implementation of the policy checklist for these cities and, (3) piloted the impact of several urban actions from a Local Urban Master Plan in a medium-sized city.

Results: The spatial indicators showed that most residents (64-84%) in large Spanish cities live in highly accessible and walkable neighbourhoods, while the software implementation also raised methodological challenges. The new version of policy indicators analysis provided a detailed analysis of a wide range of indicators to be evaluated despite a greater investment of time was required. Moreover, the importance of having a local collaborator to help validate the policy results was noted.

Conclusions: The open data and software framework developed for the 1000-city challenge allows for highly detailed spatial indicators. The experience of applying the new version of indicators has been successful. Spatial and policy indicators can be applied in large-scale and comparable analyses of healthy and active cities.

Practical Implications: Spatial and policy indicators and evaluation can be highly useful for local and regional planners to understand not only the spatial distribution of infrastructure and services that promote health but also to their effectiveness and identify possible inequalities between and within cities.

ABSTRACT 4

Engaging local decision makers to join the 1000 Cities Challenge in Mexico. 

César Hernández-Alcaraz, Eugen Resendiz, Alejandra Jáuregui, Deborah Salvo

Background: In addition to measuring what matters, it is imperative to engage with local stakeholders, including government and non-government organizations (NGO), to support evidence-based decision making and benchmarking in cities (i.e., using evidence for action). Recently, funding was secured for Mexico to join the 1000 Cities Challenge, scaling the application of the indicators of the Global Observatory of Healthy and Sustainable Cities (GOHSC) to 10 cities, and building partnerships with local decision makers to enable evidence-based urban policy and planning in Mexico.

Purpose: To describe the process of engaging local decision-making agencies in Mexico, for enhancing the reach and impact of the 1000 Cities Challenge.

Methods: Ten cities of varying sizes and economic development levels were selected (Mexico City, Guadalajara, Monterrey, Merida, Toluca, Tijuana, Leon, Cuernavaca, Colima-Villa de Alvarez, and Tapachula) joining the 1000 Cities Challenge. A local (Mexican) GOHSC Executive Committee has been established, charged with designing a consultation process to identify and engage governmental and non-governmental agencies and actors.

Results: A variety of engagement strategies have been implemented, including initial email contacts and direct messages on social media, and key NGO partners have been identified, which in turn are facilitating connections with local government agencies. A GOHSC/1000 Cities Challenge workshop for engaging local government representatives is being planned for 2024.

Conclusions: Building equitable partnerships with NGOs and other decision-making agencies involved in the urban policy and planning realms is an effective strategy for optimizing the scale up and impact of GOHSC in countries like Mexico.

Practical implications: The process of identifying and engaging local decision makers for supporting GOHSC activities may be context-specific. Adaptations to this process is recommended across countries and regions, based on the local policy making landscape, to maximize the impact of data for promoting healthier and more sustainable cities worldwide.