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.
The tool helps you to prioritise health within budgets, secure further funding, and assess mandatory health impact.
It allows practitioners and policy-makers to:
The Healthy Cities Generator is tailor-made for practitioners and decision-makers to support health-driven urban interventions.
Assess the current state of a neighbourhood and identify planning priorities to meet your health goals.
See how much your urban plan could save on health each year and the impact per person.
Estimate the health impact of your plan and adjust urban strategies to improve health outcomes.
Bring community voices into your work to bridge data and dialogue.
The Healthy Cities Generator is based on several research projects, as well as ongoing support and validation from leading entities and experts. These collaborations allow us to better understand local dynamics, generate evidence-based solutions and consolidate strategic alliances that amplify the tool’s impact.
The tool has been built to ensure applicability across a wide range of scales and local contexts, not requiring specific data or capabilities from city users.
We are continuously improving the tool with new functionalities and adapting it to different contexts and languages to suit every need.
Funded by:
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.
