What makes cities healthy, equitable, and environmentally sustainable? Lessons from Latin America (360G-Wellcome-205177_Z_16_Z)

Our programme will leverage an unprecedented interdisciplinary team across multiple cities in Latin America, newly compiled harmonized multilevel data, and intersectoral partnerships to gain understanding of how complex changes in urban environments affect health, social inequalities in health and the environmental sustainability of cities. The project will integrate various aspects of environments including the natural environment, the physical environment, and economic and social environments in order to study how they jointly affect population health and heath inequalities. We will also capitalize of policies and interventions occurring throughout the region to learn about health and environmental impacts through evaluation of natural experiments. We will combine state-of-the-art multilevel and longitudinal data analysis approaches with systems approaches to capture the full range of dynamic relations involved and gain insights into processes and the plausible effects of interventions. We will disseminate findings through extensive outreach. This project will leverage unique features of the Latin American region (one of the most urbanized areas of the world) to produce generalizable knowledge about the links between urbanization, health, and environments and to identify effective ways to organize, design and govern cities to improve health, reduce health inequalities, and maximize environmental sustainability of cities all over the world.