The Healthy Cities Generator is a freely available digital tool, designed to make it easy for urban planners, health professionals and policy makers to incorporate health factors into urban planning and urban factors into health policy.
Generate health in your city with our award-winning planning tool!
Asses your baseline and identify urban priorities to meet your health goals.
Review the impact of your plan or current urban environment on health.
See how much your urban plan could save on health each year.
Bring community voices into your work to bridge data and dialogue.
With this practical, evidence-based tool, users can understand the health impact of urban planning, and see how small adjustments could make a big difference to the lives of local people.
From the planning perspective, the user can enter their own planning actions or characteristics of an existing area, and immediately visualise the specific health effects on 30 health indicators (physical, mental & environmental health).
For health, the tool includes an assessment to help citizens and practitioners understand their areas’ strengths and weaknesses, and guides the user to planning & social actions that will improve their health results.
This holistic and scientifically-backed approach won the Healthy Cities Generator the award of Best Research Paper for the previous research work and tool development at the Healthy City Design conference in 2023, as well as the award of Best Initiative with Social and Health Impact in the INTEGER project.
Want to learn more? Check out our Urban Determinants of Health and our Health Impacts of Urban Determinants.
To make the process as simple and accessible as possible, the tool is based on a qualitative approach that doesn’t demand the user to input any hard data. However, the user should have sufficient information on the plan they want to assess, such as reports, plans or other documents referring to the plan’s proposed actions. These should allow the user to determine the plan’s actions impact on the different aspects of the built environment.
Within the tool itself offers detailed explanations of each one of the urban determinants of health, with indications on how to evaluate them and which health indicators they impact the most. The Healthy Cities’ expert team also offers training and support to professionals and planners that are looking for a deeper understanding of the links between urban planning and health.
Yes. The HCG’s visual and interactive results allow users to quickly assess the health impact of different iterations of a plan and see how small adjustments can have different impacts on the health indicators.
Yes. The HCG is based on a holistic model that takes into account many aspects of the built environment that impact health (density, mobility, variety, landscape, housing & energy). However, while doing the assessment it is possible to deactivate any aspects that aren’t relevant to the plan, so these won’t be taken into account when calculating the results.
If you are interested in learning more about a certain topic, on our resources page you can find other complementary tools that focus on specific topics (such as mobility or greening).
Yes. The tool is currently adaptable to different cities and regions. It includes pre-defined standard data, but this can be modified by the user, allowing for tailored solutions that address specific health and mobility challenges in your area. If you would like to further adapt the tool to your specific context, this is available upon request.
