Welcome!

The emerging Healthier Cities & Communities Hub at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health encompasses education, research, knowledge translation, and service activities focused on informing, designing and evaluating solutions for complex urban problems impacting population health.

The Hub is being co-led by Dr. Blake Poland and Dr. Patricia O’Campo with the support of a wonderful advisory group.

Our vision is an effective hub for university-community collaborations aimed at building healthier cities and communities through solutions-focused research.

Our mission is to catalyze and foster partner-based, solutions-focused research, education and knowledge exchange to measurably improve urban and community health locally and beyond. Healthier Cities and Communities initiatives will be “solutions-focused”; this requires going beyond describing health inequities and determinants with new efforts to undertake research that generates evidence on interventions to improve health. Solutions-focused research targets proximal and ‘upstream’ macro-social drivers of health inequity, and promising levers of change.

At this stage of hub development, we are focusing on three interrelated theme areas: Resilient Cities, Built Environment and Health and Place Based Interventions. Learn more about these themes here.