Co-designing healthy and sustainable cities: what Paris residents teach us about urban environmental health

September 24, 2025

This study introduces a place-based model of urban environmental health drawn from residents’ perspectives.
• Highlights eight interconnected local parameters of environmental health.
• Demonstrates that residents link environmental health to everyday nuisances like noise, air pollution, and lack of safety.
• Shows that viable and livable environments depend on inclusive governance and infrastructure decisions.
• Offers a replicable approach for other cities to assess urban health from the ground up.

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How migration and climate crisis impact the health of migrant populations in Santiago, Chile

September 13, 2025

Using a qualitative approach, we examined health vulnerabilities and community strategies in response to climate crisis conditions, involving 22 residents from the Toma Nuevo Amanecer informal settlement. Primary data was collected through ethnography, a focus group, and semi-structured in-depth interviews. This approach aimed to understand how extreme weather events, such as landslides, heatwaves, floods, fires, and air pollution, impact migrant communities and their coping strategies.

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Can child-friendly walkability be improved in a two-wheel traffic-saturated city like Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam?

July 15, 2025

Ho Chi Minh City’s motorbike-dependent traffic, severe congestion from overloaded infrastructure, high accident rates among children and pedestrians, and a doubling of overweight and obesity rates among children over the past decade have driven a comprehensive study on children’s walkability. This study serves as a foundation to encourage more walking among children as an initial step toward addressing these critical issues.

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A psychology and power intervention to help decision-makers prioritise health in ­­­urban development

July 13, 2025

Evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the built environment has an impact on people’s health, particularly in terms of noncommunicable diseases such as asthma, diabetes and poor mental health. However, health is rarely prioritised in urban planning decisions at present, and earlier work by this research group has shown that senior decision-makers feel they lack the power to influence planning and policy decisions in order to improve the situation. This intervention area adds to the wider research programme, which is focused primarily on the delivery of quantifiable socio-environmental and health economics valuations. People make decisions not just based on economic valuation, so an understanding of why people make decisions and how those decisions can change is essential. This paper describes the methodology that will be used to develop this intervention. Findings will be published later.

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A health equity-informed review of pedestrian urban designs and place attachment, sense of community

June 13, 2025

Building place attachment and sense of community through design can improve community well-being, yet reviews on this topic are lacking. This manuscript presents a systematic review of the links between pedestrian designs and place attachment and sense of community, and also highlights several health equity considerations to encourage new ideas about inclusive and healthy urban design practice and study.

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