Healthy Urban Places: a systems approach to understanding how to harness the power of local places to improve population health and reduce inequalities: HUP-North

The places in which we live can make us healthy or ill. Clean air, quality housing, parks, public transport, access to shops, arts and cultural opportunities, schools and health services all make a difference to our physical and mental health. Unfortunately, some areas have more unhealthy environments which means people living in these areas experience poorer health.

By improving the places where people live, we have an opportunity to improve the health of communities in most need. But what we improve needs more consideration - for example, should we improve parks, provide more sporting facilities, build more homes, reduce traffic, regenerate high streets, reduce the number of fast-food outlets or open more libraries? HUP-North's aim is to help the people in charge of cities make the best decisions they can through a focus on research evidence, and by working with communities, researchers, and decision-makers in Bradford (West Yorkshire) and Liverpool (Cheshire and Merseyside).

We have chosen these places as they both have large cohort studies including >3million people, which follow large groups of people over time to understand what causes ill-health. They do this by collecting information from people using surveys, and from information collected by GPs, hospitals and schools. HUP-North will set up 'Community Collaboratives' in Bradford and Liverpool which will bring together communities, researchers and decisionmakers to guide our work.

We will work in eight different neighbourhoods in Bradford and Liverpool and train community members to be peer researchers. These peer researchers will speak to over 1000 residents to explore the relationship between health and place. Using maps, we will explore how history has shaped the places in which we live, and we will combine these maps with community-collected information about issues important to residents (e.g. youth centres, fly tipping, areas they feel unsafe, public transport times, traffic). Using our cohorts, we will look to understand those features within local places that are most important for health. By working in an inclusive way with communities we can give decision makers the information they need to improve places.

Impact

Immediate: increased capacity of communities, researchers, and stakeholders to work together to generate evidence to inform improvements to local places; opening up of local and regional channels to allow academic and community evidence to inform policy ideas and directions; enriched open access spatial data sets, guidance, and toolkits for decision makers.

Medium term: greater understanding of the value of community knowledge (evidence) in research and policy processes; improved understanding of the costs and potential impacts of different types of place-based interventions; empowered communities confident in evidence based advocacy; increased inter-disciplinary expertise bridging policy and research divides; evidence based co-production and evaluation methods embedded into local authority and health systems, alignment of health and planning priorities to maximise potential of urban regeneration; influence on budgets and spending decisions to prioritise place based NCD prevention.

Long term: Improved places, improved health, reduced inequalities.