Called Healthy Urban Places, the project will invite the local community to contribute to the study, which explores how the local environment impacts on health and wellbeing. It recognises that the local environment has a role to play in population health and can help slow or even prevent certain illnesses, such as depression, respiratory and other chronic diseases.

The UKRI’s Population Health Improvement UK (PHI-UK) initiative has awarded more than £8m to Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, the University of Liverpool, and other organisations to deliver the project by working with partners in two major northern cities – Bradford and Liverpool.

The project will investigate how and why health is affected by the quality of local environments. It will look at housing and air quality, access to parks, public transport, schools, and health services, etc. It aims to inform and influence policymakers on decisions that improve local places for health, particularly for those who need them the most. In Liverpool and Bradford, the project is supported by the cities’ respective mayors.

‘Community collaboratives’ in Bradford and Liverpool will bring together communities, researchers, and decision-makers to guide the work. The collaboratives will train local people to become peer researchers who will speak to residents to explore what makes a healthy place. They will work with key stakeholders and decision-makers to investigate how place-based changes impact on the health of communities.

Dr Rebecca Geary, the Liverpool lead for the Healthy Urban Places community collaboratives, said: “The Healthy Urban Places project will support Liverpool as an emerging city collaboratory – a place where communities, researchers and policymakers work together to tackle determinants of health and inequalities. Through the creation of the community collaboratives, we’ll embed sustainable community and policy engagement into our research processes – using methods and creating spaces that support dialogue and learning together.”

In Liverpool, the project will generate maps, neighbourhood portraits, short films and photographs, use existing health data, and add built environment data created by partners at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, focusing on characteristics prioritised by communities. These data insights will also contribute to Liverpool’s C-GULL study – a birth cohort study designed to track the health and wellbeing of local families over time.

“Everyone should have access to the right environments to support their health and wellbeing,” commented Professor Sarah Rodgers, from the University of Liverpool and overall Liverpool lead. “The Healthy Urban Places project builds on our systems expertise at the University of Liverpool. Focusing on a whole-systems approach to understand the power of local places to improve population health and reduce inequalities is particularly important for us in a region with profound health inequalities.”