Published June 10, 2025 | Version v1
Journal article Open

Building a Healthy Urban Design Index (HUDI): How to promote health and sustainability in European cities

Authors/Creators

  • 1. ROR icon Barcelona Institute for Global Health

Contributors

Contact person:

Description

This repository supports the development and application of the Healthy Urban Design Index (HUDI), a framework designed to assess and promote health and sustainability in European cities. The HUDI model integrates multiple dimensions of urban design—such as walkability, green space availability, air quality, and access to services—into a composite index aimed at guiding evidence-based urban planning and policy.

The dataset includes:

  • DATA/: Contains input datasets used to construct the HUDI, including urban metrics, environmental indicators, and health-related variables across selected European cities.

  • results/: Contains processed outputs, including intermediate calculations and final index scores

  • plots/: A subfolder with visual outputs that illustrate spatial patterns and statistical findings from the analysis.

These folders are required to run the code available in the associated GitHub repository and reproduce the results as described in the related publication. The codebase relies on this dataset structure for functionality.

This work contributes to the growing field of healthy urbanism and is intended to support researchers, urban planners, and policymakers in designing cities that enhance well-being and environmental resilience.

Related GitHub repository: GitHub URL: https://github.com/federicamontana/Healthy-Urban-Design-Index/tree/main
License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
Keywords: urban health, sustainability, urban design, spatial analysis, Europe, healthy cities, HUDI

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Additional details

Identifiers

DOI
10.1016/S2542-5196(25)00109-3.

Related works

Is supplemented by
Data paper: 10.1016/S2542-5196(25)00109-3. (DOI)

Dates

Accepted
2025-06-10
Research paper

Software

Repository URL
https://github.com/federicamontana/Healthy-Urban-Design-Index
Programming language
Python

References

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