Bax & Company’s Sofia Aivalioti tours frontrunner cities as Lead Expert for Europe’s One Health transition
recently welcomed Bax & Company’s Sofia Aivalioti as the lead expert of One Health 4 Cities. This URBACT project brings together 9 European cities to put the health of people, animals, and the environment at the centre of urban improvement projects. “Following the pandemic, there has been a renewed energy to consider health and wellbeing […]
Designing human habitats healthy enough to prescribe
Bax & Company’s Healthy Cities team has guided a group of expert urban practitioners to understand the power of prescribing green space and socialising for urban wellbeing. Organised by the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), the workshop showed planners and health professionals how to use urban design as a first-choice treatment for mental illness […]
How Barcelona is designing its streets for health and happiness – Ideas That Happen
We are the only animals which build habitats that harm us. Eloi Juvillà, Director of Building and Logistics at the Diputacio de Barcelona, speaking on Ideas That Happen We recently sat down with Eloi Juvillà, Director of Building and Logistics at the Diputació de Barcelona, to learn how Barcelona is rethinking city design for healthy […]
The Open Source Starter Kit for Public Service Delivery
To help public service providers harness digital solutions to do more with less, Bax & Company has produced the Open Source Starter Kit for Public Service Delivery. The Kit contains three documents to help providers make sense of the value that cost-effective open source solutions can offer their service delivery. The Municipality of Dordrecht developed […]
5 Lessons from European Cities Using Open Source Software to Improve Public Services
Digital innovation is key to improving public services, and relies heavily on supporting softwares… Cities and governments have a responsibility to exploit digital innovation as it represents a key opportunity for meeting citizens’ expectations of next generation public services and helps cities in solving societal challenges. Open collaboration around software development and data sharing can […]
Exploiting the Potential of Open Source Software for Better, Cheaper, Faster Public Services
The world is changing. Transformations of mobility patterns, pressing air quality issues, and growing flood risks present new challenges for European cities. Now, however, thanks to data and digitalisation, cities can tackle these challenges together. Rather than reinventing the wheel or going down the traditional software vendor route with its associated issues, cities can improve local […]
Connectivity, Mobility, and Healthy Cities
The Healthy Cities Network aims to deepen the relationship between health and the urban environment, following a holistic approach by focusing on three overarching topics: greening and landscaping, mobility and connectivity, and lifestyle and sports. To gather expert advice for urban planners on improving health outcomes in cities, we are creating a series of three […]
Halfway Through Healthy Cities: Reflections and Revisions
The Healthy Cities Network has passed its halfway point in the project. To evaluate all we’ve done and look ahead at what’s to come, we’re taking this opportunity to reflect on our progress with the Mid-Term Reflection (MTR) process. by Lead Expert Dr. Sebastiaan van Herk Originally published: URBACT Healthy Cities Though the pandemic slowed […]
Crowd data can improve city services, efficiency, and quality of life. Ghent’s Justine Ottevaere explains why.
Crowd monitoring in cities gained considerable attention with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The City of Ghent, however, was a step ahead, as they were already working with crowd data well before the start of the pandemic in 2020. To understand how and why cities should strategically look at crowd data, we interviewed Justine […]
Share and Share Alike: Replicable Open-Source Solutions for Improved Public Service Delivery
Originally published in IoT For All by Amber De La Haye, Camilla Sandberg, Juliette Tenart and Sebastiaan van Herk Our world is changing. Transformations to mobility patterns, pressing air quality issues and growing flood risks present new challenges for European cities. Now, however, thanks to digitization and data, cities can tackle these challenges together. Rather than reinventing […]
Reclaiming the Public Space for People and Nature
Originally published in ‘Mark and Focus: Building a Smart, Resilient, Nature-Based Future’, by Bax & Company’s Sofia Aivalioti. Cities are fascinating. They are the places where most of us live, work and grow. If cities are not designed for their people, then we are doing something wrong. What makes a city thrive? What makes a city […]
Gender Equal Cities are Healthy Cities
By Sofia Aivalioti, Amber De La Haye, Sebastiaan van Herk, and Marta Rofin Serra. What makes a city a healthy place to live, work, and socialise? And do planning needs differ depending on gender? For International Women’s Day this year we are exploring some key ideas of how urban planning can be used to foster […]
HEALTHY CITIES: Bridging Urban Planning and Health
By Sofia Aivalioti, Sebastiaan van Herk, Marta Rofin Serra and Amber De La Haye. Almost all urban planning policies and actions have an impact on human health. Think busy, polluting roads, unwalkable streets, or access to shops selling fresh fruit and vegetables. By baking health factors into every stage of the planning process, the HEALTHY […]
Making cities healthier, faster
The COVID-19 pandemic that has sent the world into lockdown has also affected, but not derailed, progress towards building healthier cities. In fact, it’s only under confinement that many people truly took stock of their living environment – their homes, streets and neighbourhoods – and appreciated the value of accessible green spaces. It was also […]
4 recommendations for successful blue and green infrastructure in cities
Our climate action project BEGIN (Blue Green Infrastructures through Social Innovation) just published its policy brief, which sets out four recommendations for local governments that aim to construct Blue and Green Infrastructure (BGI) in their cities. Co-authored by Dr. Jannes Willems (Erasmus University Rotterdam), Prof. Richard Ashley (IHE-Delft), Dr. William Veerbeek (IHE-Delft), Ellen Kelder (City of Dordrecht), and our […]
Social innovation: building blue and green infrastructure in cities
In this edition of Beyond Bax, we discuss social innovation as a tool for the implementation of blue and green infrastructure (BGI) with Jannes Willems, assistant professor in urban planning at the University of Amsterdam and former postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Public Administration and Sociology, Erasmus University Rotterdam. What is social innovation? JW. […]
Preparing for a crisis and building healthier cities
Modern medicine has managed to either wipe out or control the infectious diseases that plagued humankind for so long. But when a new strain appears, such as COVID-19, it becomes clear that we are not always prepared to fully comprehend the threat level and respond accordingly. How can we better prepare our cities and people […]
Innovative Procurement: insights from Glasgow City Council
Innovative procurement is a much more flexible and open process compared to traditional procurement. Instead of buying a specific product or service the local authority is given an opportunity to discover new approaches. It’s allowing them to have a greater influence on products and find solutions that are catered to solving particular challenges, but will […]
Green public spaces for health and well-being
by Sebastiaan van Herk, Sofia Aivalioti, Karlien Sambell, Gregor Giannella & Kees Joosten Cities are starting to apply more nature-based solutions (NBS), aiming to enhance health, well-being, climate resilience and biodiversity. Urban planners and researchers are advancing in designing and valuing NBS, but with limited understanding of the actual positive impacts. NBS can mean much […]
