Healthy places research

The quality of the built environment directly impacts our mental and physical health, just as material and design choices can harm or nourish Country.

In Australia, there is great opportunity to ensure that urban planning, landscape and design support public health, rather than contributing to non-communicable ‘lifestyle’ diseases. This is an urgent matter. If our built environment is not designed carefully, changing demographic factors will create significant health and wellbeing challenges – particularly for marginalised communities.

Our University is a world-leading force in medical and health research, with significant distributed expertise in the social and political determinants of health and wellbeing. There are many cross-disciplinary partnership opportunities to systemically research and contribute to the design of built environments. This requires an integrated approach that spans design cultures and practices, public policy, procurement, construction and new forms of building code and regulation.