Research
Know Your Health – Empowering citizens to create healthy cities
- ‘Know Your Health’ is an online tool and guide designed to empower citizens to understand and mitigate the health impacts of their urban environments.
- Through a quick, anonymous survey, individuals receive tailored advice on adapting their surroundings or habits to enhance health. This sits alongside the ‘Playbook’ which offers explanations of key themes and examples of solutions implemented around the world.
- Through the survey data, ‘Know Your Health’ aims to uncover urban health trends, spotlighting the role of environmental factors in health disparities.
PLP Labs, Centric Lab, and Comuzi have united to introduce ‘Know Your Health,’ an online platform paired with a downloadable guide aimed at enhancing urban health and wellbeing. This initiative leverages a simple, anonymous survey to offer personalised advice, helping individuals navigate and improve their health against the backdrop of city living. The project further extends its impact by offering a ‘Playbook’ that delves into seven critical areas of urban health, from housing to social spaces, enriched with actionable steps, case studies, and resources. Beyond individual benefits, ‘Know Your Health’ collects anonymised data to inform and influence equitable urban development, spotlighting the nuanced effects of environment on health and advocating for inclusive, community-focused design and policy decisions.
PLP Labs, Centric Lab and Comuzi have launched ‘Know Your Health’, an online tool and downloadable guide to help people living in cities identify how their environment is impacting their health, and then empower them to improve their situation and long-term health resilience as individuals and a community.
The team of architects, designers and data and neuroscience researchers has created a quick and anonymous online survey that helps individuals determine the extent to which their local environment provides them with the resources to achieve an everyday baseline of strong health. The survey also feeds back personalised suggestions for steps that they can take to alter their environment or daily habits to improve their health.
Taking this survey then unlocks the download of a detailed ‘playbook’ exploring seven key areas: housing, biodiversity, mobility, nourishment, social spaces, governance and infrastructure. Each section includes suggestions for positive steps people can take, whether that be changing your own behaviour, forming local groups or petitioning local authorities.
The playbook is supported by inspiring case studies – ranging from British rapper Loyle Carner’s cooking school for teenagers with ADHD, to temporary interventions by #CAMINA (#WALK) to reclaim the streets of Mexico City for pedestrians and HullCoin, the world’s first community loyalty points scheme – as well as links to additional resources from charities and organisations such as Living Streets and the Urban Land Institute.
As well as being a tool for individuals to improve their personal and community’s health, anonymous information collected from the survey will be used to identify key trends that are occurring throughout our cities.
COVID-19 has focused attention on how a person’s physical environment impacts on their health and wellbeing. However, vast health disparities in cities were worsening before the pandemic due to increasing levels of air, noise and light pollution. These environmental stressors are often compounded by psychosocial stressors such as low income, difficulty accessing education and local services, lack of housing and crime, which have been shown to often disproportionately affect BAME communities the UK and around the world.
Whilst primarily taking a bottom-up approach to empowering communities, ‘Know Your Health’ also aims to highlight the human-scale impacts and inequalities of urban design and policy decisions to property developers, local authorities and investors. The feedback and data has the potential to offer a new way for asset managers and developers to engage with tenants and communities.
Centric Lab
A neuroscience lab creating strategies to improve public health. We are a research and data driven lab helping organisations make effective decisions for supporting mental and physical health, specifically for communities that are the most susceptible to poor health outcomes.
www.thecentriclab.com
COMUZI
COMUZI is a design studio based in London. We work with inventive companies & organisations to explore, imagine, prototype & invent radical products, services, experiences different ways of thinking.
https://www.comuzi.xyz/
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