We are pleased to announce that Urban Design 4 Health has now been in business for over a quarter of a century!  Over these 25 years, we have experienced a lot of changes in the growth and development of this emerging field of research and policy linking city planning and public health.  UD4H grew out of our own earlier work in the 90’s that first conceptualized and then created and applied new methods to measure and quantify connections between the ways we build our urban environments and our health and wellness.  While this work is well documented in the peer reviewed academic literature; there is a companion story of UD4H’s efforts along the way applying new methods and tools in a broad range of community settings nationwide.

About 2024: Understanding health, climate, and equity impacts of contrasting transportation investments, land use, and urban design solutions gained momentum this year amidst major federal investment.  UD4H and our partners made several significant advancements in the development and application of tools in 2024 to document a broader range of health impacts from a wider set of transportation and land use actions.  UD4H developed a web portal (below) where predicted local results for a range of health outcomes from our National Public Health Assessment Model (N-PHAM) can be viewed by communities across the nation.

N-PHAM (below) is based on peer reviewed models that predict a wide range of health related outcomes and is built off a broad set of social / cultural and built / natural environment metrics we have constructed across the nation and can be readily employed anywhere in the nation.  

This year N-PHAM passed internal peer review at the US Environmental Protection Agency allowing it to be more widely used agency-wide and supported by other end users.

We successfully created the first automated “AI driven” modeling approach known as the PEDestrian Public Health Assessment Model (PED-PHAM) to detect and then evaluate health (objectively measured physical activity) benefits of pedestrian scale complete street features. This prototype was funded by NIH’s National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and done in partnership with Arizona State University (Dr. Marc Adams) and supported with data provided by UC San Diego (Dr. James Sallis).  

This successful prototype supports further development and commercialization of a fully operational tool that captures the benefits of relatively easy to implement pedestrian environment features (sidewalks, seating, crossings) in addition to other walkability, accessibility, demographic, and natural environment metrics.  This work builds directly on a patent UD4H received in 2023 and supports the National Public Health Assessment Model (N-PHAM) platform, which has been used in over a dozen regions of North America (see map).    

This year NPHAM was applied in new locations, including Sacramento, where the Sacramento Area Council of Governments (SACOG) hired UD4H to document the relative health effects of contrasting regional growth patterns.  Our work documented reduced risk of diabetes and heart disease from concentrating future growth into more walkable transit supportive areas. The figure below shows the allocation of future growth (blue bars) from the most urban areas “centers and corridors” to “rural.”  The red line represents an increasing prevalence rate for coronary heart disease from left to right (most to least walkable community environments).  Pathway 3 shown is the most transit-oriented walkable future growth pattern or alternative considered within the long range plan update.  Our model results predict Pathway 3 would likely result in 11.4 percent fewer cases of coronary heart disease compared with Pathway 1;  the least compact, most car-oriented Pathway. 

Looking ahead to 2025

We will continue scaling and commercializing our decision support tools. New, even more capable versions of N-PHAM and now PED-PHAM are being developed. This will take us even further toward completing the entire invention covered by a patent we were awarded in 2023.
We are expanding our services to better reach healthcare providers, real estate developers, and investors, and have created what will become an effective commercialization plan as we evolve from a traditional consulting and research entity to a data and software as a service provider. 

Please let us know how we can help you better evaluate and consider health impacts in your work. Have a wonderful holiday season, and best wishes in the new year!

Our Team

UD4H Alumni Associates

• In 2024, Mr. Eric Fox and Dr. Behram Wali took new positions.
• We thank them both for their contributions to UD4H.

UD4H can help you integrate health, equity, and the environment more fully into your work. We use our innovative, evidence-based, and objectively measured data and tools to promote human health, social equity, environmental resilience, and sustainable economic development.

Learn more about the services we offer here. Contact us if you would like to discuss ways we can help.