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Understanding healthy urban systems

This long-term collaborative research program aims to build an interdisciplinary perspective on population health in urban environments, thus contributing to public health and urban planning policy and practice.

• 13 March 2008 | Updated 14 October 2011

• Background
• Research focus
• Anticipated outcomes

Background

In 2004, CSIRO and the Australian National University's National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health (NCEPH) began discussing the need for an interdiscplinary research program to explore links between urban environments, food systems and human health.

The Fenner Conference on Urbanism, Environment and Health in Canberra, May 2006 took these discussions further. 

In December 2006, the Australian Capital Territory's Health department - ACT Health - sponsored a smaller, more focussed follow-up workshop for Canberra researchers. 

The common research interests that emerged from the workshop inform this new CSIRO-NCEPH collaboration.

By bringing together expertise from the health and the environmental domains, the collaboration aims to improve our understanding of the evolving interactions between ecosystems and urban populations, and the associated impacts on human health, feeding into public health and urban planning policy and practice.

Traditional, single-disciplinary science is poorly equipped to develop, investigate and answer the questions required for understanding these interactions and impacts.

However, by assembling a truly interdisciplinary team, the Healthy Urban Systems collaboration fills a research vacuum, and is well-placed to address the underlying issues in urban population health.

Research focus

The collaboration's research is focussed on four themes:

• systems modelling of the determinants of healthy weight in urban environments
• the impact of prolonged drought on urban food systems and diet-related health
• toolkits for the planning, design, and assessment of healthy urban environments
• transitioning urban systems for greater resilience to health impacts and surprises. 

Anticipated outcomes

The collaboration expects to achieve theoretical and practical outcomes, enabling policy makers, urban planners, public health practitioners and researchers to better face the challenges arising from modern urban environments and lifestyles.

Some of these anticipated outcomes include:

• developing models to describe the complex web of processes operating across multiple sectors and scales that connect people and urban environments
• testing hypothesised pathways from drought, through effects on agricultural production and nutrition systems, to flow-on impacts on diet-related health
• conceptual and analytical techniques for assessing the effects of different types of urban form on the ’healthy weight’ outcomes of people
• better understanding of the impact of contemporary urban policy, regulation, infrastructure, services, technology and information on population health.

Read the Sustainable cities and coasts.