Good city planning produces co-benefits for individual and planetary health and wellbeing. In 2016, the Lancet Series on urban design, transport, and health drew attention to the importance of integrated upstream city planning policies as a pathway to creating healthy and sustainable cities and proposed a set of city planning indicators that could be used to benchmark and monitor progress.
In this follow-up series, published in The Lancet Global Health, the Series authors, led by Billie Giles-Corti, show how the indicators can guide decisions about what must change to create healthy and sustainable cities and how research can be used to guide urban policy to achieve urban and population health. They provide tools that other cities can use to replicate the indicators and explore “where to next” to create healthy and sustainable cities, particularly in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change. This series includes Brown School’s Professor Deborah Salvo.