The study ‘Theoretical framework to develop an urban health index using built environment variables: the case of Ferrara, Italy’ won the Best Poster Award at the CISBAT 2023 – International scientific conference on the Built Environment in Transition, held in Lausanne, Switzerland, from September 13 to 15, 2023.
This research is the result of a collaboration between the group of Prof. Enrico Caiani from the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering and the Urban Simulation Lab of Prof. Eugenio Morello from the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies at the Politecnico di Milano, in the context of the Air-Break project (ERDF Urban Innovation Actions 2020 - UIA 05-177).
The quality of our habitat strongly determines the well-being of both our society and us as individuals. The concept of computing an Urban Health (UH) index to provide visual, graphical, and statistical insight into various health indicators and health determinants within particular geographic boundaries, with a focus on capturing intra-urban health disparities, is rapidly emerging.
In this study, the quality of the built environment as a proxy for urban health was assessed, and a theoretical framework to construct a UH index was proposed, including feature selections for urban health indicators, and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to derive their weights.
This framework was applied on the city of Ferrara, Italy, thus obtaining promising results. The results of this approach may be used by public health workers, evaluators, statisticians, program managers, academic researchers, and decision makers to examine the current status of urban areas, to assess change and the effect of program interventions, and to plan for urban improvements to improve citizens' health.