Living in cities impacts on our health and the health of the planet. If you were able to develop your city to prioritise health, what would you change first?
The SCU team have just launched Shape Our City, a creative, online consultation that allows you to step into the shoes of a city decision maker, weigh up the evidence and have your say on the health of our city. Working within a realistically limited budget, you will have to make trade-offs between types of investment and the scale at which you invest. Do you think it’s more urgent to improve the quality of buildings, to make roads safer, to increase the number of cycle paths or amount of green space, or to improve access to healthy food?
Developed by the Our City, Our Health project at UWE Bristol, along with web designers Soto, artist Andy Council and with the input of local communities in Bristol, the consultation uses estimates of how much money could really be saved – by the NHS, by employers, and by people – by making healthier changes to our urban environment. The crucial research on health savings has been rigorously produced by the UPSTREAM urban health project, funded by the Wellcome Trust, and formed of a collaboration between researchers from UWE (in public health and built environment), University of Bath, Daniel Black and Associates, Gabriel Scally Public Health, University of Geneva and
University of Washington.
Shape Our City is part of a project encouraging citizens to take a more active role in urban decision-making concerning their health – and the health of future city residents. Luke Jerram’s Inhale diesel soot particle sculpture, 3 million times larger than the real size of a diesel soot particle and designed to start conversations about the invisible health risks of air pollution, is another part of the project, and, in Bristol, Shape Our City will be gathering citizen preferences until November 2018.
What you choose to prioritise will be used to inform city developers and future research on designing cities for people and planetary health: so make sure you invest wisely!
Sophie Laggan, Project Coordinator of Our City, Our Health in SCU says: “We have gathered the latest evidence on the links between the built environment and our health and also quantified the health costs and savings from how cities are developed. Our consultation reveals these savings so, for the first time, we can make visible the positive benefits to be gained from prioritising our health in urban decision-making – and find out what is most important to you. It’s all quite exciting!”