Estimating the Health Benefits of Compact Cities

A Healthy Cities Scenario Planner

Welcome to the Healthy Cities Scenario Planner. This tool has been built as an interactive guide to show how changes in urban land use and transportation can positively affect the health of a city’s population. This model has been built using principles from the Lancet ‘Urban design, transport, and health’ series of publications.

As our world becomes ever more urbanised, cities will increasingly be the places where we live, work, play, travel, and interact. The capacity for cities to affect our health, both positively and negatively, has never been greater. The way we interact with cities through transport, exposure to pollution, and levels of physical activity can all affect our exposure to a range of acute and chronic diseases such as road trauma, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and respiratory disease. In this tool we have condensed effects of all of these diseases into a single metric — a ‘healthy year of life gained per 100,000 people’.

By interacting with the land use and transport policy levers below, you can see how many extra healthy years of life you could add to each of our example cities; Melbourne, London, Delhi, Boston, Copenhagen, and Sao Paulo.

Think about which interventions benefit each of the example cities most. Why do some interventions work better for some cities than others? Then think about your own city — what could you do to improve the health of your population?

Scenario: Infrastructure Density Walking + Cycling Diversity Distance

Scenario

Compact Cities model

In this scenario, each city focused on the way they used their land.

Firstly, they chose to increase the density of their city by xx% rather than increase the size of their city and contribute to urban sprawl. This reduced the average distance that people needed to travel for work, school, recreation and everyday items.

They complemented this density by enabling a xx% greater mix of residential, commercial and public use buildings and spaces. This further reduced the distances people had to travel, reducing distances travelled by car and therefore pollution and risk of injury.

Lastly, they increased the distribution and proximity of public transport hubs by xx%, which increased uptake of public transport, further reducing road trauma and pollution, which contributes to cardiovascular and respiratory disease.

Sustainable Transport model

In the sustainable transport scenario, not only did the cities incorporate the principles of the Compact Cities Model, but also introduced 3 further enhancements.

Firstly, even greater effort was made to reduce the distance of public transport locations to residents, encouraging uptake, reducing risk of road injury and death and also reducing pollution, which contributes to cardiovascular and respiratory disease.

Secondly, cities made a concerted effort to swap 20% of kms currently travelled by cars to either walking or cycling. This increased physical activity of the population, significantly reducing rates of Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

Higher rates of walking and cycling, however, left more people vulnerable to road injury and death due to interaction with cars. To combat this, each city invested in separated infrastructure, so that at least 50% of walking and cycling kms occurred on safe paths, away from traffic.

Design your own model

What would you do to build your own healthy city? What factors would you prioritise? What would be feasible?

Adjust the levers in each category to see the impact your plan could make.

Design of Cycling and Walking Infrastructure

The proportion of walking and cycling kms travelled that are on separated road infrastructure (i.e. protected from cars)

Density

Increasing the density of a city, rather than increasing urban sprawl

Walking + Cycling

Kilometres usually travelled by drivers and passengers swapped to walking and cycling

Diversity

Increasing the mix of land-use to blend residential, commercial, and community uses together

Distance

Reduction in average distance of housing to public transport options

*A ‘healthy year of life gained per 100,000 people’