How we design and plan the places where people live has a profound impact on public health and community wellbeing. From access to green space and opportunities for active travel to the quality of housing and neighbourhood design, our environment plays a vital role in creating healthier communities.
These issues were at the heart of From Evidence to Impact: Delivering Healthy Urban Development, held at the Royal College of Surgeons of England in London on 8 September 2026.
Delivered by the Landscape Institute, the Healthy Urban Places (HUP) and Born in Bradford research programmes, this event brought together researchers, policymakers, planners, designers, health professionals and practitioners to explore how evidence can be translated into policy and action.
The HUP programme has used NIHR ARC infrastructure funding to build a multidisciplinary team with expertise in health inequalities, data, knowledge exchange and implementation. This investment has strengthened their capacity to translate research into impact while developing the skills and partnerships needed to secure larger-scale UKRI funding. HUP’s data component also aligns with the ARC North West Coast (NWC) Care and Health data Innovation (CHI) sub-theme (within Evidence4Impact) creating opportunities to connect data and analytical expertise across programmes and further strengthen future collaborative bids.
The NWC and Yorkshire & Humber (Y&H) ARCs have worked closely together, bringing complementary expertise, experience and networks to HUP. This collaborative, cross-regional approach has strengthened the development and delivery of the work, enabling teams to share learning and build lasting relationships. The partnership also provides a strong foundation for developing future collaborative research and funding opportunities across the two ARCs.
Professor Sarah Rodgers, HUP investigator, NIHR Senior Investigator and ARC NWC theme lead, attended the event. She said:
“The day showed why we need to rethink what successful development means. In many northern areas, land values do not rise enough to fund all the features that create healthy places, so public and grant investment has a crucial role in preventing the north–south inequality gap from widening. Health cannot remain an optional ‘co-benefit’. It needs to be designed in, measured as part of success, and protected when schemes come under financial pressure. Attracting developers (with public grants) who can spend effort on healthy designs must become “the normal in the north”.
Most importantly, communities need to co-design developments from the beginning, with genuine influence over what is built. I now understand how important it is that planning and regeneration teams need to treat health, health equity and community involvement as fundamental development outcomes, not measures that can be removed because they sit outside traditional planning priorities. We need to properly join up our health and planning teams to work most effectively with developers.”
The emphasis on moving from evidence to impact is particularly important. Research provides an essential foundation for understanding what contributes to healthier places, but its value is realised when that knowledge influences real-world decisions. Bringing researchers together with those responsible for planning, designing, investing in and delivering living places creates an opportunity to ensure health evidence is considered earlier and more consistently.
The accompanying Healthy Places Parliament Reception, hosted by the Landscape Institute, provided a further opportunity to continue these conversations with policymakers and stakeholders, highlighting the importance of collaboration in putting healthier places at the centre of decision-making.
Dr Emily Nix, Research Programme Coordinator at HUP, shares:
“All day, we heard how important it is to improve how we tell the story and advocate for healthy places. If health is not a main goal, we risk missing out on the benefits that place-based developments and investments can bring to health and wellbeing. The evidence and best-practice examples shared should reach more than just those at the event. They need to get to every design and planning professional, every medical practitioner, and every decision-maker to have the greatest impact.
By the end of the event, there was a real sense of energy and shared commitment in the room. The event united a room of diverse people from research, policy and practice around a common goal and made it clear that we all have both an opportunity and a responsibility to keep the conversation going.”
For both ARCs, the event reinforced the value of bringing different disciplines and perspectives together. By connecting evidence, policy and practice, we can help build a stronger case for health to be considered at every stage of creating the places where people live – helping to make healthier, more sustainable places the norm rather than the exception.