Building a Healthy Urban Design Index (HUDI): how to promote health and sustainability in European cities

Area of Science:

• Urban planning and public health
• Environmental science and sustainability
• Spatial analysis and geographic information systems (GIS)

Background:

• Accelerating global urbanization necessitates integrating health and well-being into urban planning.
• Existing indices often lack spatial granularity and focus on large cities, overlooking smaller urban populations.
• The Healthy Urban Design Index (HUDI) is introduced as a high-resolution spatial index for European cities.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and apply a high-resolution spatial index (HUDI) for assessing urban health factors in European cities.
• To combine policy-relevant indicators across urban design, sustainable transportation, environmental quality, and greenspace accessibility.
• To extend urban health assessment to small and medium-sized cities, encompassing over 50% of Europe's population.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of 917 European cities using the 2018 Urban Audit database and open-source spatial data at a 250 m grid scale.
• Grouping cities into five clusters based on population size (large metropolitan, metropolitan, medium-sized, small, small towns).
• Calculation of 13 standardized indicators across four domains (urban design, sustainable transportation, environmental quality, green space accessibility) and aggregation to city level.
• Application of differential weights to calculate HUDI, ranking cities within clusters, and spatial analysis (Local Moran's I) to identify areas needing improvement.

Main Results:

• HUDI scores varied from 2.9 to nearly 7 out of 10, indicating significant room for improvement in urban environments.
• Larger metropolitan cities excelled in urban design and sustainable transport, while medium/smaller cities performed better in environmental quality.
• Smaller cities often lacked accessible green spaces despite surrounding greenery; a clear East-West divide in scores was observed, with Western European cities scoring higher.
• Findings highlight the influence of city size and regional factors on urban sustainability and public health outcomes.

Conclusions:

• HUDI is a scalable, high-resolution, open-data tool providing data-driven insights for urban planners and policymakers to identify areas for improvement.
• The index facilitates comparisons, knowledge sharing, and informed decision-making to enhance public health and urban sustainability.
• HUDI's open-source nature encourages data sharing and collaboration, highlighting data gaps and promoting better data collection practices.