Measuring and monitoring progress towards achieving healthy, equitable and sustainable cities is a priority for planners, policymakers and researchers in diverse contexts globally. Yet data collection, analysis, visualisation and reporting on policy and spatial indicators involve specialised knowledge, skills, and collaboration across disciplines. Integrated open-source tools for calculating and communicating urban indicators for diverse urban contexts are needed, which provide the multiple streams of evidence required to influence policy agendas and enable local changes towards healthier and more sustainable cities. This paper reports on the development of open-source software for planning, analysis and generation of data, maps and reports on policy and spatial indicators of urban design and transport features for healthy and sustainable cities. We engaged a collaborative network of researchers and practitioners from diverse geographic contexts through an online survey and workshops, to understand and progressively meet their requirements for policy and spatial indicators. We outline our framework for action research-informed open-source software development and discuss benefits and challenges of this approach. The resulting Global Healthy and Sustainable City Indicators software is designed to meet the needs of researchers, planners, policy makers and community advocates in diverse settings for planning, calculating and disseminating policy and spatial urban indicators.

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Benchmarking and monitoring of urban design and transport features is crucial to achieving local and international health and sustainability goals. However, most urban indicator frameworks use coarse spatial scales that either only allow between-city comparisons, or require expensive, technical, local spatial analyses for within-city comparisons. This study developed a reusable, open-source urban indicator computational framework using open data to enable consistent local and global comparative analyses. We show this framework by calculating spatial indicators—for 25 diverse cities in 19 countries—of urban design and transport features that support health and sustainability. We link these indicators to cities’ policy contexts, and identify populations living above and below critical thresholds for physical activity through walking. Efforts to broaden participation in crowdsourcing data and to calculate globally consistent indicators are essential for planning evidence-informed urban interventions, monitoring policy effects, and learning lessons from peer cities to achieve health, equity, and sustainability goals.

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This Series on urban design, transport, and health aimed to facilitate development of a global system of health-related policy and spatial indicators to assess achievements and deficiencies in urban and transport policies and features. This final paper in the Series summarises key findings, considers what to do next, and outlines urgent key actions. Our study of 25 cities in 19 countries found that, despite many well intentioned policies, few cities had measurable standards and policy targets to achieve healthy and sustainable cities. Available standards and targets were often insufficient to promote health and wellbeing, and health-supportive urban design and transport features were often inadequate or inequitably distributed. City planning decisions affect human and planetary health and amplify city vulnerabilities, as the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted. Hence, we offer an expanded framework of pathways through which city planning affects health, incorporating 11 integrated urban system policies and 11 integrated urban and transport interventions addressing current and emerging issues. Our call to action recommends widespread uptake and further development of our methods and open-source tools to create upstream policy and spatial indicators to benchmark and track progress; unmask spatial inequities; inform interventions and investments; and accelerate transitions to net zero, healthy, and sustainable cities.

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Urban liveability is a global priority for creating healthy, sustainable cities. Measurement of policy-relevant spatial indicators of the built and natural environment supports city planning at all levels of government. Analysis of their spatial distribution within cities, and impacts on individuals and communities, is crucial to ensure planning decisions are effective and equitable. This paper outlines challenges and lessons from a 5-year collaborative research program, scaling up a software workflow for calculating a composite indicator of urban liveability for residential address points across Melbourne, to Australia’s 21 largest cities, and further extension to 25 global cities in diverse contexts.

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An essential characteristic of a healthy and sustainable city is a physically active population. Effective policies for healthy and sustainable cities require evidence-informed quantitative targets. We aimed to identify the minimum thresholds for urban design and transport features associated with two physical activity criteria: at least 80% probability of engaging in any walking for transport and WHO's target of at least 15% relative reduction in insufficient physical activity through walking. The International Physical Activity and the Environment Network Adult (known as IPEN) study (N=11 615; 14 cities across ten countries) provided data on local urban design and transport features linked to walking. Associations of these features with the probability of engaging in any walking for transport and sufficient physical activity (≥150 min/week) by walking were estimated, and thresholds associated with the physical activity criteria were determined. Curvilinear associations of population, street intersection, and public transport densities with walking were found. Neighbourhoods exceeding around 5700 people per km², 100 intersections per km², and 25 public transport stops per km² were associated with meeting one or both physical activity criteria. Shorter distances to the nearest park were associated with more physical activity. We use the results to suggest specific target values for each feature as benchmarks for progression towards creating healthy and sustainable cities.

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Pedestrian accessibility is an important factor in urban transport and land use policy and critical for creating healthy, sustainable cities. Developing and evaluating indicators measuring inequalities in pedestrian accessibility can help planners and policymakers benchmark and monitor the progress of city planning interventions. However, measuring and assessing indicators of urban design and transport features at high resolution worldwide to enable city comparisons is challenging due to limited availability of official, high-quality, and comparable spatial data, as well as spatial analysis tools offering customizable frameworks for indicator construction and analysis. To address these challenges, this study develops an open source software framework to construct pedestrian accessibility indicators for cities using open and consistent data. It presents a generalized method to consistently measure pedestrian accessibility at high resolution and spatially aggregated scale, to allow for both within- and between-city analyses. The open source and open data methods developed in this study can be extended to other cities worldwide to support local planning and policymaking. The software is made publicly available for reuse in an open repository.

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Creating healthy and sustainable cities should be a global priority. Some cities prioritize 15-minute cities as a planning approach with co-benefits for health, climate change mitigation, equity, and economic recovery from COVID-19. Yet, as our recent Lancet Global Health series on “Urban Design, Transport, and Health” showed, many cities have a long way to go to achieve this vision. This policy guideline summarizes the main findings of the series, which assessed health and sustainability indicators for 25 cities in 19 countries. We then outline steps governments can take to strengthen policy frameworks and deliver more healthy, equitable, and sustainable built environments.

The Lancet Global Health series provided clear evidence that cities need to transform urban governance to enable integrated planning for health and sustainability and commit to policy implementation. Evidence-informed indicators should be used to benchmark and monitor progress. Cities need policy frameworks that are comprehensive and consistent with evidence, with measurable policy targets to support implementation and accountability. The series provided evidence-informed thresholds for some key urban design and transport features, which can be embedded as policy targets. Policies and interventions must prioritize identifying and reducing inequities in access to health-supportive environments. Governments should also invest in open data and promote citizen-science programmes, to support indicator development and research for public benefit. We provide tools to replicate our indicators and an invitation to join our 1000 Cities Challenge via the Global Observatory of Healthy and Sustainable Cities.@en

City planning policies influence urban lifestyles, health, and sustainability. We assessed policy frameworks for city planning for 25 cities across 19 lower-middle-income countries, upper-middle-income countries, and high-income countries to identify whether these policies supported the creation of healthy and sustainable cities. We systematically collected policy data for evidence-informed indicators related to integrated city planning, air pollution, destination accessibility, distribution of employment, demand management, design, density, distance to public transport, and transport infrastructure investment. Content analysis identified strengths, limitations, and gaps in policies, allowing us to draw comparisons between cities. We found that despite common policy rhetoric endorsing healthy and sustainable cities, there was a paucity of measurable policy targets in place to achieve these aspirations. Some policies were inconsistent with public health evidence, which sets up barriers to achieving healthy and sustainable urban environments. There is an urgent need to build capacity for health-enhancing city planning policy and governance, particularly in low-income and middle-income countries.

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