Urban Health and Well-being

How do cities influence the health of populations?

Urbanisation continues apace in all regions of the world, producing opportunities for creative, connected societies and their constituent communities to thrive but bringing a range of devastating implications for health and wellbeing – from social exclusion to air pollution to chronic diseases and novel communicable diseases.

The impacts on health in cities are affected by a complex set of interactions, including socioeconomic status and features of the built environment such as green space and public transit infrastructures. Cities are also sites of increasing mobility/migration, overcrowding with concomitant poor sanitation conditions, and unequal access to essential health services. Important social determinants of health may also be directly affected by climate change.

To respond to these challenges, in 2018 the InterAcademy Partnership established an Urban Health Working Group (UHWG) to identify ways in which academies can add value to global, regional and national discussions and efforts to improve health in urban populations. At the IAP General Assembly in 2019, IAP’s member academies approved the proposal that the UHWG should move from an ad-hoc group to become a regular activity. The IAP UHWG also engaged in the International Science Council’s ‘Urban Health & Wellbeing’ programme that proposed a new conceptual framework for considering the multi-factorial nature of both the determinants and the manifestations of health and well-being in urban populations. In 2022, IAP commissioned a report to understand what national academies have been doing in the field of urban health and its broad determinants. And in 2023, IAP signed a memorandum of understand to stimulate cooperation with the International Society for Urban Health (ISUH).

In 2025, the IAP UHWG, composed of about 20 international renowned scientists, has been renewed under the leadership of Dr. Jo Ivey Boufford, Director of the Doctor of Public Health Program and Clinical Professor of Global and Environmental Health, New York University, USA, and former co-chair of IAP-Health (as it was then known).

This year, the working group will have a prominent role in the International Urban Health Summit which brings together researchers and practitioners to address key issues of urban health through the lens of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. The Summit, held in Hannover, 9-11 April, provides an occasion for IAP and its UHWG to leverage the work being done in different national academies to bring the issue of urban health to the global attention and work towards the establishment of a holistic view of health in the cities and urban areas.

Read and download the programme of the IUHS 2025 here.