Completed Public Health & Healthcare Society, Politics & Law

Pathways to Equitable Healthy Cities (London Hub for Urban Health)

Funder Wellcome Charity-funded
Recipient organisation Imperial College London
Funding £5.2M
Period Sept 2018 — Sept 2022

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

A city’s transport system, housing stock, and green spaces can either shorten or extend its residents’ lives, and this hub will build the evidence to prove which changes work best for whom. The problem is that urban policymakers often lack rigorous, comparative data on how interventions in sectors like energy, transport, or waste management affect health outcomes and inequalities across different populations. The London Hub for Urban Health, Sustainability and Equity will fill that gap by running participatory studies in six cities—Accra, Beijing, Dhaka, London, Tehran, and Vancouver—and building predictive models that let officials test policy scenarios before committing billions to infrastructure. If successful, the hub could transform how cities plan everything from bus routes to building codes, shifting from guesswork to evidence-based decisions that reduce chronic disease and narrow the health gap between rich and poor neighbourhoods. The work is applied, not fundamental science: it directly targets real-world policy levers, with the explicit goal of embedding its findings into government and civil society decision-making.

View original technical description
The London Hub for Urban Health, Sustainability and Equity aims to be the world’s foremost transdisciplinary hub for research, training and pubic engagement on urban health. It is founded on two constituent projects – Complex Urban Systems for Sustainability and Health (CUSSH) and Pathways to Equitable Healthy Cities (PEHC) – and involves leading London-based institutions and their global network of collaborating institutions. The Hub’s principal objective is to integrate and coordinate research and stakeholder engagement that support evidence-based policies aimed at improving population health, health equity and environmental sustainability in cities around the world. The Hub, and its projects, will achieve this objective through comparative studies that involve participatory research and coproduction of knowledge among academic researchers, policy makers and practitioners, and civil society; developing models for prospective policy evaluation and applying these models to data from our partner cities; and training the next generation of research and policy leaders in urban health, while establishing the foundations for sustaining and expanding the Hub beyond the Wellcome funding period. The PEHC project focuses on how policy scenarios that involve changes to key urban sectors and services impact population health and health inequality in Accra, Beijing, Dhaka, London, Tehran and Vancouver.

View the original record at the funder ↗

Researchers

Majid Ezzati (EPMC Awardee)

Related Research

Grants with similar aims, by meaning.

Pathways to equitable healthy cities
GCRF Accountability for Informal Urban Equity Hub
Complex Urban Systems for Sustainability and Health (CUSSH)
Healthy Urban Places: a systems approach to understanding how to harness the power of local places to improve population health and reduce inequalities (HUP-North)
Healthy Urban Places: a systems approach to understanding how to harness local places as tools to improve population health and reduce inequalities

Original classification

Discretionary Award - OPOH

Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.