What is Urban Health

At the UHC, when we use the term “urban health,” we are referring to both a field of study and an area of practice.

The study of urban health focuses on identifying key drivers of health in urban areas, with the goal of identifying interventions or policies that can be used to improve the health of urban residents. The practice of urban health refers to acting on urban systems in ways that promote health via programs, policies, or other interventions.

Why Focus on Urban Health?

Because urban populations continue to grow worldwide. The most up-to-date estimates suggest that today, close to 80% of the world’s population lives in urban areas.
Because the impact of urban living can be beneficial or detrimental to health, depending on how cities are governed, built, and managed.
Because cities and other urban contexts provide many opportunities to act in ways that improve population health and reduce health inequities.

What Are Some Fundamental Characteristics Of The Field Of Urban Health?

Place-based: urban places have interacting social and physical features that can impact health.
Multilevel: factors relevant to urban health can be defined at multiple levels, including countries, regions, metropolitan areas, cities, and neighborhoods, among others.
Multi-sectoral: Sectors relevant to urban health extend beyond health care to encompass urban planning and transportation, water and sanitation, education, social services, and the economy, among others.
Multi-outcome: Urban environments can affect multiple different health-related processes, each of which can simultaneously impact many different health conditions.
Equity-oriented: Urban areas are home to large social and health inequities arising from structural and systemic forces. These inequities can be manifested at the levels of the individual and neighborhoods.
Community and policy engaged: Improving health in cities requires community and policy maker engagement across the range of activities, from identifying the most pressing problems, to conducting research, to developing policies and interventions, to implementing and evaluating these policies and interventions.
Interdisciplinary: A prominent feature of urban health has been the collaboration between public health and urban planning professionals. But other disciplines, including the health professions broadly, sociology, anthropology, political science, economics, environmental sciences, and the arts, are important to urban health research and action.
Environmentally conscious: By definition, urban health focuses on the impact of the environment on the health of urban populations. But it also considers the impact of urban living on regional and planetary ecosystems. It seeks to identify ways to design and govern cities so that they are simultaneously healthy and environmentally sustainable.
Bridging local to global: The global impact of urbanization means that promotion of urban health must include a global focus. The ability to compare and contrast the experiences of cities all over the world can generate enormous learning opportunities. Local experiences thus acquire global relevance, and global experiences and trends can inform local decisions.

How Does The UHC Approach Urban Health?

For more details on how the Urban Health Collaborative approaches urban health, see:

Diez Roux, A.V. & Bilal, U. Advancing Equitable and Sustainable Urban Health. Nature Medicine 31, 3634-3647 (2025)

Lovasi GS, Diez Roux AV, Kolker K eds. Urban Public Health: A Research Toolkit for Practice and Impact. Oxford University Press, 2020. ISBN:9780190885304

What Is a City?

Public health leaders from major East Coast cites describe aspects of an urban area.