1000 Cities Challenge

Our vision for the Global Observatory of Healthy and Sustainable cities is that it will:
- Be used as a surveillance, reporting, goal setting, policy making, practical guidance and advocacy tool.
- Encourage the scaling up of healthy and sustainable urban design and planning efforts.
- Provide data comparability across multiple cities of the world.
- Grow to include additional city planning indicators and comparable data for over 1000 global cities.
As such, the scorecards and reports for the 25 cities, in 19 countries and 6 continents available to date as part of the Observatory, are only the beginning of a bolder, global challenge.
We are seeking active engagement of geospatial data scientists from around the world to join our collaborative that can:
- Use our open access tools with your own local urban spatial and policy data, for generating indicators for your city.
- Become involved in the development new urban policy and planning indicators of healthy and sustainable cities.
Open access resources
The following paper by our team describes a generalized framework for measuring pedestrian accessibility around the world using open data:
Liu, S., Higgs, C., Arundel, J., Boeing, G., Cerdera, N., Moctezuma, D., Cerin, E., Adlakha, D., Lowe, M. Giles-Corti, B. (2021). A Generalized Framework for Measuring Pedestrian Accessibility around the World Using Open Data. Geographical Analysis.
https://doi.org/10.1111/gean.12290 (Published journal version)
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2105.08814.pdf (Open access preprint)
Global Healthy and Sustainable City Indicator Study Collaboration – 25 Cities spatial indicators datasets: https://rmit.figshare.com/articles/dataset/Global_Healthy_and_
Sustainable_City_Indicator_Study_Collaboration_-_25_Cities_spatial_indicators_datasets/15072009