Healthy Liveable Cities Lab Vision and Goal Statements

Vision

Healthy and sustainable cities for all

Goal

Transforming cities through evidence

Values

Integrity

Innovation

Collaboration

Impact

Equity

About Our Group

Creating healthy, liveable and sustainable cities is a major challenge in the face of population growth, social inequalities, traffic congestion, increases in non-communicable diseases and climate change. Planning and delivering better cities are local, national and global priorities.

Healthy and liveable neighbourhoods provide the basis for social equity, harmony, economic resilience and environmental and social sustainability. Our research aims to not only contribute to academic scholarship, but to inform policies and practices to create healthy and sustainable cities.

Bringing together a multidisciplinary research team, this program examines the influence of city design and planning on health and wellbeing.

Our research is developed in partnership with stakeholders to inform best practice policy and planning by simulating, modelling and assessing the health impact of planning and transport interventions aimed at creating healthy and sustainable cities.

Our multidisciplinary team are drawn from a range of disciplines including architecture, behavioural science, econometrics, geography, geospatial and computer science, health economics, public health, social epidemiology, sociology, sociology ecology and transport and urban planning. We use a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods including geospatial analyses, agent-based modelling, policy analysis and economic evaluation.

Our priority areas are to:

• explore the nexus between place, health and wellbeing, with a particular focus on spatial disadvantage, by developing health-related spatial indicators locally, nationally and globally,
• simulate, model and assess the health impacts of local and state planning policies and interventions, including transport, land use and health impact,
• influence future policies to improve population health outcomes.

We have a strong focus on research translation and engagement, collaborating with communities, government, non-government organisations and the private sector in health, urban planning, housing and transport.

We are members of the NHMRC-funded The Australian Prevention Partnership Centre (which co-funded our Creating Liveable Cities in Australia report and Australian Urban Observatory); and are currently working with Cambridge University on the JIBE project. From 2014-2020, we led the NHMRC Centre of Research Excellence in Healthy, Liveable Communities and were collaborators on the Clean Air and Urban Landscape Hub supported through funding from the Australian Government’s National Environmental Science Programme (which also co-funded our Creating Liveable Cities in Australia report).

The HLCL is led by a group of RMIT researchers, Dr Belen Diomedi-Zapata, Dr Lucy Gunn and Professor Gavin Turrell.

Acknowledgement of Country

The Healthy Liveable Cities Lab acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nations and the traditional owners and custodians throughout Australia. We recognise their ongoing unceded sovereignty to land and waters on which we conduct our work, and acknowledge the wisdom of their Ancestors and Elders in caring for, and protecting Country over millennia. As a group of researchers focussed on place, we are committed to supporting the protection of Country through respect and care for community, place and culture in all that we do.