In 2025, Healthy Cities launched the first edition of the Healthy Cities Programme, giving cities a unique opportunity to explore how urban environments impact people’s health. Using the Urban Health Quick Scan, cities can take concrete first steps into harnessing urban development as a tool for improving wellbeing. The programme’s pilot with five cities in Europe, Australia, and Latin America demonstrates the enormous potential to make both cities and lives healthier.
What is an Urban Health Quick Scan and how can it be applied?
The Quick Scan provides a practical way to generate early evidence on the links between health and the built environment, while evaluating an urban area or plan for its potential to deliver health benefits and economic savings.
The scan is carried out using the Healthy Cities Generator tool, which assesses both the current situation of an area and the expected impact of a proposed plan, depending on each city’s needs. In this first edition of the programme, we conducted two baseline assessments and three plan assessments:
○ Baseline assessment
Identify priority urban actions that respond to local health needs:
- Madrid, Spain
- Liverpool, UK
○ Plan assessment
Assess the health impact of ongoing plans or developments:
- Lancaster, UK
- Wollongong, Australia
- Apartadó, Colombia
Case Study: Go deeper with Lancaster’s Local Plan
Lancaster’s Local Plan is a frontrunning document that has pushed boundaries in many topic areas, including health and wellbeing. In order to gain a more detailed understanding of how each policy impacts health, we focused on assessing the following six policies related to transport, climate change and development strategies.
- Policy T1-4: Park-and-ride, walking and cycling infrastructure, canal, and public transport corridors
- Policy CC1: Environmental sustainability
- Policy SP3: Development Strategy for Lancaster district.
Health priorities
After analysing Lancaster’s health data, the team identified 19 health priorities, including physical activity, obesity, and anxiety. Six urban determinants of health (green coverage, public spaces, green diversity, business density, walkability and traffic) emerged as clear goals with the potential to improve the health priorities. Specifically, proximity to public spaces and green coverage were highlighted as key urban priorities for addressing Lancaster’s health needs.
Plan profile
The Quick Scan also visualises the impact of the plan’s actions on the urban determinants. The six policies achieved a positive impact, focusing on several physical aspects of the urban environment:
- Mobility: High positive impact resulted from policies supporting cycling and walking networks (Policy T2), public transport corridors (Policy T4), and reducing city centre traffic via park-and-ride schemes (Policy T1).
- Landscape: Positive impact was observed through the integration of the Lancaster Canal as a recreational asset (Policy T3) and the enhancement of green-blue infrastructure (Policy CC1).
- Housing and energy: Significant gains were driven by Policy CC1, which targets net-zero goals, sustainable design, and renewable energy.
Health and economic outcomes
Despite their sectoral focus on transport and green infrastructure, the policies have a broad reach, generating substantial impact across all related urban determinants. For example, transport policies not only reduce traffic but also strengthen the public transport network and its integration with active forms of transport. This approach generates significant annual savings and health improvements for the population. In fact, these six policies alone are already producing a notable impact on one-third of the urban determinants.
The policies are estimated to have broad health impact across environmental, physical, and mental health, particularly addressing noise pollution, physical activity, BMI, obesity, cardiovascular, and respiratory diseases, as well as depression.
The largest economic gains are associated with improvements in premature mortality (£56 per person), chronic pain (£49 per person), and Type 2 diabetes (£36 per person).
Mark Cassidy, Chief Officer of Planning and Climate Change at Lancaster City Council, shares his experience:
“We wanted to be able to utilise the experts’ support to build our plan, making it a success by identifying the health-related vulnerabilities and helping us consider what our urban health and wellbeing priorities should be.”
Estimated
savings
+44,716,385 €
Saved per year
Saved per
person/year
+307 €
Saved per year
Life
expectancy
+0.33 months
Per person
Deaths
avoided
-1.62 deaths
Per year
DALYs
avoided
-287 DALYs
Per 100,000 habitants
What comes next?
While the Quick Scan is a useful starting point for exploring urban health, our team offers further support to put the assessment into practice:
- Conduct a detailed urban health diagnosis: Map health and urban data to identify priority areas, and guide more effective interventions. Integrating citizens’ voices offers a qualitative, user-centric perspective, and can help identify gaps in technical data.
- Develop urban health strategies: Build a long-term vision for your city that aligns urban transformation with health needs. Translate diagnosis outputs into actionable priorities to boost health and wellbeing.
- Assess health and economic impacts: Evaluate planned interventions and urban plans to ensure they address specific population health needs and provide insights on how to maximise their impact.
Get in touch
Get in touch with us to learn more about how your city plan can influence the health and wellbeing of your community.
