Walking is universally considered as healthy and is a prerequisite of mobility: moving from one place to another often starts and finishes with a walk. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), walking is the most popular means of transport across the world; however, data on walkability worldwide are scarce since in the past “walking has not been seriously considered …

The city of Accra The city of Accra, like most cities in developing countries, is a city with a constantly changing boundary driven by population growth, migration and urban sprawl. Over the years, the city of Accra has been referred to as the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area (GAMA) due to the fast-expanding nature of the city to encompass the emerging …

In March 2021, researchers from 6 countries in the Pathways consortium came together to share on-going work related to health and socioeconomic inequalities across the project’s five study cities. While typically held in person, we moved the meeting online rather than postpone for a second year running. This meeting fostered a consortium-wide discussion on how we can use interdisciplinary scientific …

Today, our home environments have become more relevant than ever as we have all been forced to “stay at home” to reduce our interactions with one another, and consequently decrease disease transmission. As such, it has become even more critical that we understand how we can make our home a healthier environment that is conducive for both wellbeing and work. …

Road pricing is increasingly being considered by cities as a strategy to manage congestion, meet climate targets, and support transport infrastructure. A handful of cities including Singapore, London, Stockholm, and Milan have already implemented large-scale road pricing systems. Most of these systems are implemented as cordon-based systems, where drivers have to pay to enter a cordoned area – usually located …

Finding correlations between objects detected in Street View images and socio-economic outcomes in an urban environment. Wandering through the streets of London, we often have quite a good intuition for whether a certain part of the city is well-off or not. Whether it’s the number of fancy cars, people in suits, or the density of Waitrose supermarkets, we find that …

My most treasured memories of childhood go back to the times my friends and I played in our backyards or on our streets. During the summer, we played outdoors every single day. We made up our plays, rode our bikes, played hopscotch, and made new friends. Watching cartoons was limited to a maximum of one hour per day. However, things …

By Abosede Sarah Alli and Jacob Doku Tetteh The 2019 Planetary Health Alliance (PHA) Annual Meeting held at Stanford University, California, USA brought together about 500 participants from more than 40 countries united by a common goal of building a strong, global and interdisciplinary community mobilized for urgent and equitable planetary health action. The PHA is a consortium of over …

We’ve just returned from Xiamen, an island off the coast of Southern China, where we attended the 2019 International Conference on Urban Health (ICUH), “People-Oriented Urbanisation: Transforming Cities for Health and Well-Being”. The conference brought more than 300 experts from 50 countries together and focused on cities as the main drivers for tackling the global sustainable development agenda. ICUH is …

Through my involvement with the Pathways to Equitable Healthy Cities project and internship through the Queen Elizabeth Scholars program, I was able to travel to both Accra and Nairobi this past summer to explore the topics of health equity and population health in two different urban health contexts. Pathways Meeting and Thesis Work in Accra, Ghana At the end of …