Director’s Message

Welcome to the Urban Design Science for Health Lab.

The lab was established to strengthen the scientific foundations of research linking built environments with population health. Its work is guided by a central principle: decisions about environments that may influence health should be supported by evidence that is rigorous, spatially explicit, and sensitive to differences between populations and settings.

Understanding how the built environment relates to health requires knowledge that crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries. Urban design and spatial science help characterise the physical organisation of places, while population health research provides approaches for examining behaviours, exposures, and health outcomes. Bringing these perspectives together lets researchers investigate built environment questions with greater conceptual and methodological precision.

The research programme spans neighbourhoods, street networks, workplaces, parks, and other public spaces. It examines physical activity, sedentary behaviour, cardiometabolic health, mental health, healthy ageing, and inequalities in access to health-supportive environments. Across these areas, the emphasis is not only on whether built environment characteristics are associated with health, but also on how researchers and practitioners define, measure, and interpret those characteristics.

A further strand of the programme examines how research findings can contribute to urban design itself. This includes spatial and environmental methods, approaches for translating evidence into urban design-relevant knowledge, and emerging methods such as parametric urban design and artificial intelligence (AI). New technologies are evaluated within the same scientific framework as established methods, with attention to their validity, accuracy, spatial specificity, and ethical implications.

The lab also supports postgraduate research training and international academic exchange. Developing researchers who can work across disciplinary boundaries is important to a field that requires both substantive understanding of environments and health and strong methodological reasoning. Collaboration across countries and research traditions further allows assumptions and findings to be examined in different geographical and population contexts.

The long-term objective is to contribute to an urban design science in which recommendations for healthier environments can be clearly traced to evidence, tested across contexts, and communicated with appropriate recognition of uncertainty. This scientific orientation provides the foundation for the lab’s continuing research, collaboration, and training.

KOOHSARI Javad, PhD (Urban Design), PhD (Sports Science)

Founder & Director | Urban Design Science for Health Lab

Top 2% Scientist (Stanford/Elsevier Global List, 2021–2025)