Periodic Reporting for period 2 - URBANOME (Urban Observatory for Multi-participatory Enhancement of Health and Wellbeing)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2022-09-01 al 2024-02-29
What is the problem/issue being addressed?
Rising urbanisation and longer life expectancy of the population, makes cities face complex health challenges that are often linked to environmental challenges and interact with the increasingly sedentary lifestyles of urban populations. Concurrently, social inequality and inequity across urban areas increases in European cities accentuating differences in health and wellbeing among population subgroups. URBANOME seeks to enhance evidence-based knowledge on how environmental quality, consumer choice, lifestyle, and socio-economic status affect health and wellbeing for particular groups across the EU and how this is determined by a number of city specific characteristics, including biophysical, social, operational, political and structural and local culture and effectiveness of governance systems.
Why is it important for the society?
URBANOME aims to identify interventions, potential investments and innovations in the urban environment towards a green, climate-neutral and smart economy to improve urban health and wellbeing as well as the quality of environment; it strives to do so with enhanced societal participation and citizen engagement. Integrating socio-economic dynamics and population vulnerability in its analytical framework URBANOME promotes social cohesion and equality, as well as inclusiveness and cost-effectiveness in environmental management, leading hopefully to more resilient, healthy, and equitable cities.
What are the overall objectives?
The overall objective of URBANOME is to promote urban health, wellbeing, and liveability, through systematically integrating health concerns in urban policies and the activities of urban citizens, on the basis of detailed and comprehensive evidence on environmental health determinants, the spatial distribution of these in the city, and the social distribution of their impact among different population groups, accounting for different lifestyles and behaviours.
Rising urbanisation and longer life expectancy of the population, makes cities face complex health challenges that are often linked to environmental challenges and interact with the increasingly sedentary lifestyles of urban populations. Concurrently, social inequality and inequity across urban areas increases in European cities accentuating differences in health and wellbeing among population subgroups. URBANOME seeks to enhance evidence-based knowledge on how environmental quality, consumer choice, lifestyle, and socio-economic status affect health and wellbeing for particular groups across the EU and how this is determined by a number of city specific characteristics, including biophysical, social, operational, political and structural and local culture and effectiveness of governance systems.
Why is it important for the society?
URBANOME aims to identify interventions, potential investments and innovations in the urban environment towards a green, climate-neutral and smart economy to improve urban health and wellbeing as well as the quality of environment; it strives to do so with enhanced societal participation and citizen engagement. Integrating socio-economic dynamics and population vulnerability in its analytical framework URBANOME promotes social cohesion and equality, as well as inclusiveness and cost-effectiveness in environmental management, leading hopefully to more resilient, healthy, and equitable cities.
What are the overall objectives?
The overall objective of URBANOME is to promote urban health, wellbeing, and liveability, through systematically integrating health concerns in urban policies and the activities of urban citizens, on the basis of detailed and comprehensive evidence on environmental health determinants, the spatial distribution of these in the city, and the social distribution of their impact among different population groups, accounting for different lifestyles and behaviours.
URBANOME interventions on both individual lifestyle and the urban scale have been developed and implemented through several co-creation workshops in each ULL.
Emission inventories comprising all major anthropogenic emission sources for the URBANOME ULLs for a recent year (2020) and for a future year (2030) have been collated (example for Thessaloniki in Fig 1) and used as input data of the modelling system WRF-Chem to derive high space and time resolution ground concentrations reflecting climatic trends for the period 2001-2050 of major air pollutants and greenhouse gases in the URBANOME ULLs. Noise levels from all sources have been mapped (example for Madrid in Fig.2) covering both the whole ULLs municipality areas and the specific intervention areas within the cities.
The URBANOME personal exposure and health/wellbeing protocols (both for quantitative and qualitative assessment) were finalized and the final standardized survey, consent form, and informative material (i.e. invitation letter, flyers, banner, withdrawal form) were translated into the different languages of countries involved.
The personal exposure and health/wellbeing study is currently ongoing in the ULLs. Currently more than 300 individuals overall in the URBANOME cities were enrolled for the sensor campaign, while about 2,000 filled in the standardized survey.
Risks for the health points addressed by the project linked to air quality levels, noise and heath spells were reviewed and sociodemographic characteristics were associated with these risks.
The URBANOME Agent-Based Modeling platform has been developed and tested for the Thessaloniki case study (Fig 3) to feed into a refined assessment of population exposure.
More than 100 local meetings with stakeholders have been organised on the co-creation of interventions, sensor campaigns and health study, as well as the collection of governance architecture information. Moreover, URBANOME networked proactively with the other project composing the Urban Health Cluster co-coordinating the working groups on science translation for policy and practice and on communication and dissemination. The UHC activities have been promoted in the EU partnership on the assessment of the risks of chemicals (PARC) and in the EURION cluster on endocrine disruptors.
URBANOME methods and results have been presented in several national/international meetings, where scientific sessions were organized and connections with relevant EU projects have been established; newsletters have been published on the project web portal (http://www.URBANOME.eu(si apre in una nuova finestra)). Eleven scientific publications have been produced while other five have been submitted or in the pipeline. More publications are expected in the last reporting period when all the project results will become available.
Emission inventories comprising all major anthropogenic emission sources for the URBANOME ULLs for a recent year (2020) and for a future year (2030) have been collated (example for Thessaloniki in Fig 1) and used as input data of the modelling system WRF-Chem to derive high space and time resolution ground concentrations reflecting climatic trends for the period 2001-2050 of major air pollutants and greenhouse gases in the URBANOME ULLs. Noise levels from all sources have been mapped (example for Madrid in Fig.2) covering both the whole ULLs municipality areas and the specific intervention areas within the cities.
The URBANOME personal exposure and health/wellbeing protocols (both for quantitative and qualitative assessment) were finalized and the final standardized survey, consent form, and informative material (i.e. invitation letter, flyers, banner, withdrawal form) were translated into the different languages of countries involved.
The personal exposure and health/wellbeing study is currently ongoing in the ULLs. Currently more than 300 individuals overall in the URBANOME cities were enrolled for the sensor campaign, while about 2,000 filled in the standardized survey.
Risks for the health points addressed by the project linked to air quality levels, noise and heath spells were reviewed and sociodemographic characteristics were associated with these risks.
The URBANOME Agent-Based Modeling platform has been developed and tested for the Thessaloniki case study (Fig 3) to feed into a refined assessment of population exposure.
More than 100 local meetings with stakeholders have been organised on the co-creation of interventions, sensor campaigns and health study, as well as the collection of governance architecture information. Moreover, URBANOME networked proactively with the other project composing the Urban Health Cluster co-coordinating the working groups on science translation for policy and practice and on communication and dissemination. The UHC activities have been promoted in the EU partnership on the assessment of the risks of chemicals (PARC) and in the EURION cluster on endocrine disruptors.
URBANOME methods and results have been presented in several national/international meetings, where scientific sessions were organized and connections with relevant EU projects have been established; newsletters have been published on the project web portal (http://www.URBANOME.eu(si apre in una nuova finestra)). Eleven scientific publications have been produced while other five have been submitted or in the pipeline. More publications are expected in the last reporting period when all the project results will become available.
Key progress beyond the state of the art and expected results include:
• Innovative forms of participation of urban citizens in co-creative policy making and planning through data collection via sensor campaigns and through involvement in adaptive governance activities promoting wellbeing health aspects of sectors such as urban greening and sustainable urban transport, thus moving from awareness to engagement and changing citizens practices
• Flexible procedures for actual policy integration of health concerns across relevant policy sectors, reflected in policy approaches and instruments adapted to the implementation context, including the behaviours and practices of multiple urban populations, in specific cities
• Use of machine learning approaches such as Agent-Based Models informed from wearable technology sensors to capture individual spatio-temporal behaviours for assessing individual exposure considering the social dynamics that modulate policy outcomes
• Methods for total exposure assessment and approaches for estimating health effects at the individual and community level
• A novel computational paradigm for integrating personalised exposure modeling to urban pollution, prediction of early physical and mood/mental disorders, deterioration of functional capacity and robust ways to preserve physical and mental well-being through digital intervention
• Use of cross-omics platforms to identify early onset of non-communicable diseases related to exposure to environmental stressors
URBANOME is expected to have a positive impact on local society and the economy contributing to more cost-effective environmental health and wellbeing management by prioritizing tangible interventions with the maximum benefit:investment ratio, enhanced urban resilience and reduced costs associated to the health burden from environmental stressors encompassing citizen behavioural change and finally mitigating social inequality and enhance social cohesion and inclusion.
What sets it apart is the quest to integrate advanced biomarker and clinical data with ethnographic approaches and citizen science through urban and individual-scale interventions that are geared to bring tangible benefits in terms of urban health and well-being in 9 cities across Europe. These cities (Fig. 2) are chosen to represent very different urban realities so that the project outcomes can be applicable throughout the EU. Innovative ways to induce citizen engagement will result into novel models for participatory urban governance focusing on enhanced urban health and sustainability.
• Innovative forms of participation of urban citizens in co-creative policy making and planning through data collection via sensor campaigns and through involvement in adaptive governance activities promoting wellbeing health aspects of sectors such as urban greening and sustainable urban transport, thus moving from awareness to engagement and changing citizens practices
• Flexible procedures for actual policy integration of health concerns across relevant policy sectors, reflected in policy approaches and instruments adapted to the implementation context, including the behaviours and practices of multiple urban populations, in specific cities
• Use of machine learning approaches such as Agent-Based Models informed from wearable technology sensors to capture individual spatio-temporal behaviours for assessing individual exposure considering the social dynamics that modulate policy outcomes
• Methods for total exposure assessment and approaches for estimating health effects at the individual and community level
• A novel computational paradigm for integrating personalised exposure modeling to urban pollution, prediction of early physical and mood/mental disorders, deterioration of functional capacity and robust ways to preserve physical and mental well-being through digital intervention
• Use of cross-omics platforms to identify early onset of non-communicable diseases related to exposure to environmental stressors
URBANOME is expected to have a positive impact on local society and the economy contributing to more cost-effective environmental health and wellbeing management by prioritizing tangible interventions with the maximum benefit:investment ratio, enhanced urban resilience and reduced costs associated to the health burden from environmental stressors encompassing citizen behavioural change and finally mitigating social inequality and enhance social cohesion and inclusion.
What sets it apart is the quest to integrate advanced biomarker and clinical data with ethnographic approaches and citizen science through urban and individual-scale interventions that are geared to bring tangible benefits in terms of urban health and well-being in 9 cities across Europe. These cities (Fig. 2) are chosen to represent very different urban realities so that the project outcomes can be applicable throughout the EU. Innovative ways to induce citizen engagement will result into novel models for participatory urban governance focusing on enhanced urban health and sustainability.