Researchers Martha Jordan and Daniel Black examined how valuation is used or perceived in UK urban development, defining socio-environmental valuation, or SEV, as an economic approach for measuring social or environmental outcomes. Their study combined a secondary dataset drawn from 123 interviews with 132 participants in a wider investigation of UK property and transport systems with nine targeted follow-up interviews conducted in 2024. The follow-up participants included senior decision-makers from private development, public agencies, professional membership bodies and third-sector organisations. All interview material was gathered between 2020 and 2024, and the researchers used thematic analysis to identify recurring themes.

Power formed the study’s central analytical framework. Resource power operates through access to money, land, information, relationships and status. Normative power arises from shared values, accepted truths and the behaviour they encourage. Structural power works through institutional arrangements that direct what organisations and societies are expected to do. Rather than treating power as a possession of particular individuals, the analysis considers how these dimensions can either enable action or restrict it. The overarching question was how much influence socio-environmental economic valuation has when urban development is expected to produce human and planetary-health benefits.

Support for stronger valuation was substantial, but it was not shared with equal confidence. Some interviewees argued that monetising health would make it “weighed into the calculations more firmly.” A broader measurement system could capture benefits that a conventional benefit-cost ratio might overlook, potentially increasing the likelihood that projects with meaningful health effects would receive public funding. Private-sector participants saw related advantages: quantified evidence could demonstrate the value of public space, distinguish one development proposal from another, attract investment or, if supplied to the market, encourage prices to incorporate social benefits.

Other participants were deeply sceptical of converting qualitative evidence into numerical indicators. One described the process as a “black box” that could translate qualitative measures into numbers, while another said they did not use tools in this area because they did not meet the evidential standard required for the Treasury to take them seriously. There were also practical concerns that a separate valuation process could require the same information to be collected and analysed twice. Very few participants, even after direct questioning in the follow-up interviews, were aware of the government’s current approach to SEV, indicating that advances remained marginal and concentrated in particular parts of central government rather than routinely used across the development system.

The interviews exposed a deeper tension between the language of growth and the pursuit of health. Participants described decision-making as consistently tilted towards economic growth, measurable outputs and financial viability, including the number of homes delivered rather than the wider quality of life created. One public-policy specialist said the Treasury’s Green Book had increasingly allowed economic considerations to predominate without weighting housing’s social effects comparably. The relationship is not a simple opposition, however: economic growth can also generate health benefits through healthcare, education and cheaper energy. The study therefore documents a difficult balance among competing priorities, including development viability and affordable housing, rather than evidence that growth itself is invariably harmful to health.

Health-focused valuation can consequently have little practical power when institutional norms reward growth, quantification and profit maximisation. Participants repeatedly described finance as the force driving delivery, even when the stated objective was housing or place-making. Values also mattered. Some interviewees acted on health because they considered it the right thing to do, whereas others said organisational culture determined whether such evidence influenced choices. If leaders define success mainly through profit, one participant warned, teams may manipulate scores to protect their bonuses. Formal requirements, training and leadership therefore shape whether a valuation method is merely available or becomes a meaningful part of decision-making. The analysis suggests that a tool capable of quantifying health could be powerful only if it acquired sufficient legitimacy within these norms.

Institutional control of critical resources was a major and continuing barrier. Interviewees repeatedly identified access to funding, control of land and the ability to set rules as decisive. Central government and the Treasury could direct finance towards chosen priorities, while landowners could exert substantial influence over development. At local level, participants described a lack of fiscal incentives for granting planning permission as a constraint on pursuing health improvements. Financial markets appeared as both obstacle and enabler: they generally rewarded development, but regulatory expectations concerning carbon, biodiversity and environmental, social and governance performance were beginning to influence investor behaviour. This combination of concentrated resources and a growth-oriented structure weakened the ability of valuation to redirect decisions toward social and environmental benefits.

Existing appraisal arrangements also appeared to enter the decision process too late to question whether a project should proceed. The Treasury’s Green Book guides assessment of the costs, benefits and risks associated with different ways of achieving objectives that have already been set; it does not set those objectives itself. The authors distinguish between asking what is the best way to undertake a project and asking what is the right project. Their analysis points to a need for earlier assessment at central-policy level, where broader social and environmental outcomes can inform strategic choices before physical infrastructure, housing or other urban development is specified. This is a conclusion about the timing and institutional level of appraisal, not evidence that monetisation by itself would improve health outcomes.

The study does not demonstrate that SEV improves health, and its authors acknowledge several limits on generalisation. It is restricted to the UK, so the findings cannot automatically be applied to countries with different political leadership, wealth or cultural values. Selection bias is possible because valuation was only one topic within the broad secondary interviews, while qualitative interpretation remains influenced by researchers’ positions. Although combining the two datasets produced material from 128 participants across 119 transcripts, the study used one conceptual framework among many available approaches to power. Its conclusion is therefore not that better numerical tools will solve the problem. The central finding is that socio-environmental valuation remains weak in practice because conflicting values, limited legitimacy and institutional incentives shape whether quantified health and environmental evidence can alter decisions at all.

Subject of Research: How power shapes socio-environmental economic valuation in UK urban development

Article Title: Understanding socio-economic valuation in UK urban development through the lens of power

Article References: Jordan, M., & Black, D. (2026). Understanding socio-economic valuation in UK urban development through the lens of power. Discover Cities, 3(1), 206. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44327-026-00385-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44327-026-00385-y

Keywords: urban development, economic valuation, public health, urban planning, interview study, economic growth, institutional power, finance, land ownership, environmental appraisal, Understanding, socio-economic

The study’s first headline finding is deceptively simple: 55 percent of respondents expressed overall satisfaction with the expropriation process, while 45 percent reported dissatisfaction. In other words, the affected population is split almost down the middle, a near-even divide that immediately signals the process is not uniformly failing or succeeding. That split matters because farmland expropriation is one of the most consequential and least reversible events in a rural household’s economic life. Once land is transferred for urban development, the primary productive asset of the family disappears, and everything that follows — income, food security, social standing, and even the daily rhythm of work — must be rebuilt from the compensation payment and whatever skills the household can redeploy. A satisfaction rate hovering at barely more than half suggests that the machinery of compensation in East Gojjam is delivering acceptable outcomes for many, but leaving a very large minority behind.

The structural transformation the researchers documented after expropriation is dramatic. Before losing their land, 81.46 percent of surveyed households relied on subsistence farming as their main livelihood. After expropriation, that figure collapsed to just 17.92 percent. The displaced farmers did not simply become urban professionals or successful small traders; instead, the largest single post-expropriation category was daily wage labor, absorbing 26.25 percent of households, while 11.25 percent fell into chronic unemployment. These numbers describe a classic livelihood transition in the development economics literature: households pushed off the land and into the informal urban labor market, where income is volatile, bargaining power is weak, and there is no harvest cycle to structure the year. Daily wage work in fast-growing Ethiopian towns typically means construction labor, loading, and other physically demanding jobs with no security, no benefits, and no protection against the shocks that a plot of fertile land once buffered.

Yet the picture is not uniformly bleak, and this is where the study becomes genuinely nuanced. Urban expansion significantly improved household access to three fundamental services: electricity, safe piped water, and road networks. Families who once lived in the service shadows of town boundaries found themselves connected to the grid, to clean water infrastructure, and to transport links that open access to markets, schools, and clinics. This dual character — improved public services alongside deteriorating livelihood security — is precisely the tension that makes peri-urban expropriation so difficult to govern. The physical infrastructure of development arrives, but the economic foundation of the displaced households does not automatically follow. A household can gain a lightbulb and a tap while losing the means to pay for anything beyond subsistence.

To move beyond description, the researchers employed an ordered logistic regression model, a statistical technique well suited to satisfaction data that falls on an ordered scale rather than a simple yes-no split. The model identified a set of socioeconomic determinants that push satisfaction up or down, and the strongest positive drivers were exactly what one would hope a well-designed compensation system would provide. The amount of compensation had a positive and highly significant effect on satisfaction, as did diversified modes of compensation — meaning payments or benefits delivered in more than one form — and the prompt timing of payments. Each of these findings is actionable. Farmers who received more money were more satisfied; farmers who received compensation in varied forms were more satisfied; and farmers who were paid quickly, rather than left waiting through bureaucratic delays, were more satisfied. Timing, in particular, is a policy lever that costs nothing in monetary terms and yet shows up as highly significant in the model.

On the negative side of the ledger, the regression revealed that residential displacement, larger family sizes, greater areas of expropriated land, and higher fertility of the lost plots all significantly reduced satisfaction levels. Each of these variables tells a coherent economic story. Families who lost not just their fields but their homes faced a double displacement, forced to rebuild both livelihood and shelter simultaneously. Larger families spread any fixed compensation payment across more mouths, diluting its purchasing power. Larger landholdings represented a bigger income stream that a one-time payment struggled to replace, especially if the household lacked the skills to invest the money productively. And the fertility of the lost plot is perhaps the most telling variable of all: the better the land, the higher the baseline income it generated, and the harder it is for any standardized compensation formula to make the household whole. Fertile land produces returns year after year, while a cash payment is spent once.

One of the most counterintuitive findings in the study concerns agricultural risk. Exposure to agricultural risks — drought, crop failure, price swings, and the other hazards of rain-fed highland farming — was positively associated with satisfaction with compensation. The explanation the authors offer is rooted in how people evaluate losses: farmers who had been struggling with unreliable harvests had lower baseline income expectations from their land, so the compensation they received compared favorably against an income stream that had become uncertain and disappointing. For these households, a guaranteed cash payment, even a modest one, represented an improvement in expected welfare. This finding is a reminder that satisfaction is a relative judgment, not an absolute one, and that compensation policy must account for what farmers think they are losing, not only what the land produces in a good year.

The methodological design of the study strengthens the credibility of these conclusions. The researchers used a multi-stage sampling design and a cross-sectional field survey, randomly selecting 480 households across the peri-urban areas of the four towns, which reduces the risk that the sample reflects only the most accessible or most aggrieved farmers. The combination of descriptive statistics, livelihood transition analysis, and ordered logistic regression allows the study to do three distinct jobs at once: quantify the satisfaction split, map the structural shift in how people earn a living, and isolate the causal correlates of satisfaction with statistical controls in place. The research received no external funding, and the authors, Haymanot Bassie Mognhod and Belete Animaw Beyene of the Department of Economics at Debre Markos University, declare no competing interests — a clean provenance for work that touches on one of the most politically charged processes in rural development.

The policy implications the authors draw are direct: fair property valuations, standardized rehabilitation guidance, and sustainable livelihood restoration frameworks. Each addresses a specific failure mode identified in the data. Fair valuation responds to the finding that compensation amount drives satisfaction and that fertile, productive land is systematically hard to replace with a flat payment. Standardized rehabilitation guidance responds to the vulnerability of households that received cash but had no roadmap for converting it into a durable urban livelihood, ending up in daily wage labor or unemployment. Livelihood restoration frameworks respond to the deepest structural finding of all — the collapse of subsistence farming from over 81 percent of households to under 18 percent — by treating compensation not as an endpoint but as the starting capital for a deliberate transition into stable urban employment or enterprise. As African cities continue to expand at some of the fastest rates in the world, the East Gojjam evidence makes a compelling case that the question is no longer whether farmland will be expropriated, but whether the people who worked it will be equipped to survive the transition. The 55 percent who are satisfied show it can be done; the 45 percent who are not show how easily it is not.

Subject of Research: Socioeconomic impacts of farmland expropriation and compensation satisfaction among peri-urban farming households in Northwest Ethiopia

Article Title: Farmers’ satisfaction and livelihood transitions following farmland expropriation in East Gojjam Zone, Northwest Ethiopia

Article References: Mognhod, H. B., & Beyene, B. A. (2026). Farmers’ satisfaction and livelihood transitions following farmland expropriation in East Gojjam Zone, Northwest Ethiopia. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04937-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04937-5

Keywords: farmland expropriation, peri-urban expansion, livelihood transition, compensation satisfaction, ordered logistic regression, Ethiopia, East Gojjam, subsistence farming, daily wage labor, urban development, land governance, rural livelihoods

The research combines three complementary techniques, each filling in a different layer of the story. Sediment coring provided vertical slices through the landscape, revealing the sequence of natural and human-made deposits beneath the site. Electrical resistivity tomography and direct-current resistivity soundings mapped subsurface structures horizontally, tracing buried features without breaking the surface. Finally, phytolith analysis, the study of microscopic silica bodies formed within plant tissues, allowed the researchers to reconstruct which plants grew around the city and how vegetation changed as urbanization took hold. Together, these methods produced a picture of Bubastis that no single approach could deliver: a city whose growth, layout, and even its religious geography were dictated by the shape of the land beneath it.

The most consequential discovery concerns a set of Pleistocene sand mounds known as Geziras. These are relict landforms, remnants of ancient sandy deposits that rise subtly above the surrounding floodplain and, crucially, stay dry during the Nile’s annual inundation. Garbe’s surveys identified several of these mounds across the Bubastis area, and their positions are anything but random. The Temple of Pepi I in the western part of the city stands on one. The palace and the cemetery area in the north occupy others. Residential zones in eastern Bubastis cluster on still more. Even a lost monument may now have a location: an additional mound in the southeastern part of the site can plausibly be linked to the Temple of Hermes, a structure known from ancient writings whose whereabouts had been uncertain. The new evidence supports those textual clues about where the temple once stood.

This pattern reveals a deliberate urban logic. Rather than spreading indiscriminately across the floodplain, the builders of Bubastis selected flood-safe Geziras for their most important and most permanent structures, while leaving the low-lying ground between them for uses that could tolerate, or even benefit from, seasonal flooding. The geomorphology of the Delta was not an obstacle to be overcome but a framework to be exploited. In a landscape where the Nile’s branches shifted course and flood levels fluctuated over the centuries, choosing the right piece of ground was a matter of survival, and the people of Bubastis appear to have understood that from the city’s earliest days.

The coring program also quantified just how intensively different parts of the city were used. In settlement area S1, the researchers documented anthropogenic deposits reaching a thickness of up to 9.5 meters, an extraordinary accumulation of debris, building material, and occupation layers that identifies S1 as the primary living quarter of the city. The thickest deposits date particularly to the Ptolemaic period, from about 332 to 30 BCE, and the Roman period, from about 30 BCE to 200 CE, showing that these late phases of Bubastis’s history were also among its most densely built. By contrast, the surrounding low-lying floodplain areas, especially area S2, show only sparse settlement evidence. These marginal zones were likely given over to agriculture, and they had a distinct advantage for it: a nearby Nile branch, flowing to the north and northeast of the city, regularly deposited nutrient-rich sediments across the floodplain, keeping the fields naturally fertilized.

The phytolith record adds a biological dimension to this reconstruction, tracking vegetation from the end of the last ice age through the city’s decline. During the transition from the Late Pleistocene to the Early Holocene, long before Bubastis existed, the landscape was dominated by grasses, shrubs, and trees, a natural Delta environment shaped by river processes rather than human hands. That changed with the arrival of settlement. From the Old Kingdom onward, spanning roughly 2850 to 2180 BCE, the onset of occupation coincided with a marked increase in cereal-type phytoliths. Crucially, these cereal signatures appear in the nutrient-rich floodplain sediments, providing the earliest evidence for localized cereal cultivation at Bubastis during the Early Old Kingdom. The fields, in other words, were already feeding the city in its formative centuries.

Inside the settlement itself, the phytolith data tell a different story. Elevated proportions of cereal-type phytoliths in anthropogenic deposits across the urban area, and particularly in the main residential zone S1, point to intensive cereal processing and storage taking place within the city walls. Grain was not only grown nearby but handled, threshed, milled, and stockpiled in the residential quarters, a pattern that speaks to the scale of Bubastis’s population and the logistical sophistication required to sustain it. The city was, in a very real sense, an agricultural machine as much as a religious and administrative center, with its food economy woven directly into the fabric of its neighborhoods.

Over time, that arrangement shifted. From the Late Period, beginning around 664 BCE, through Roman times, cultivation practices increasingly moved toward the settlement periphery. As Bubastis expanded and its builders consumed more land, the natural vegetation around the city diminished, and farming was pushed outward to the edges of the urban footprint. This trajectory, from cultivation embedded within and immediately around the early settlement to agriculture relegated to the periphery of a sprawling city, mirrors patterns familiar from urban growth in other ancient and modern contexts, but here it is documented with unusual precision through a combination of sediment chemistry, landform mapping, and plant microfossils.

The broader significance of the work lies in what it says about human adaptability in unstable environments. The Holocene Nile Delta was shaped by a constant interplay of river avulsions, sedimentation, and seasonal flooding, conditions that created fertile opportunities for early civilization while simultaneously driving settlement instability and frequent relocation. Bubastis’s longevity was not an accident of geography but the product of choices: siting temples and palaces on high ground, farming the fertile lows, and adjusting land use as the city and its environment co-evolved. Different geomorphological settings were deliberately selected for specific functions and phases of occupation, a dynamic interplay between nature and human decision-making that unfolded over three thousand years.

The study also refines interpretations of Bubastis’s emergence as a center of religious and administrative power, a status reflected in its extensive temple and palace areas, including the famous Temple of Bastet with its man-made sacred canals identified in earlier geoarchaeological work. Until now, knowledge of the site’s environmental conditions rested on a handful of historical texts and preliminary studies. By delivering the first area-wide reconstruction, the new research demonstrates how strongly the development of an ancient Egyptian urban center depended on regional environmental conditions, and it showcases the value of geoarchaeological methods for reconstructing human-environment interactions across the Delta, where so many settlements rose and fell with the shifting waters of the Nile. For Bubastis, the ground beneath the city was never just a foundation. It was a partner in the city’s survival, and reading that partnership from the sediments is what finally explains how one Delta town outlasted them all.

Subject of Research: Holocene landscape evolution and long-term settlement development at the ancient Egyptian city of Bubastis in the southeastern Nile Delta

Article Title: Holocene landscape evolution and settlement development in the surroundings of the ancient Egyptian city of Bubastis (“Tell Basta”), southeastern Nile Delta

Article References: Garbe, P. (2026). Holocene landscape evolution and settlement development in the surroundings of the ancient Egyptian city of Bubastis (“Tell Basta”), southeastern Nile Delta. E&G Quaternary Science Journal, 75(2), 169-171. https://doi.org/10.5194/egqsj-75-169-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/egqsj-75-169-2026

Keywords: Bubastis, Tell Basta, Nile Delta, geoarchaeology, Holocene, Geziras, phytoliths, sediment coring, electrical resistivity tomography, ancient Egypt, urban development, Nile flooding

The research team, led by Faduma Jama Hussein of the Department of Social Work and Social Administration, together with Omar Arabow Addan and Hibo Ilyas Ahmed, adopted a qualitative phenomenological design to capture how stakeholders experience participation from the inside. Rather than measuring project outputs with external indicators, the researchers conducted semi-structured interviews with 27 purposively selected participants, including community leaders, civil society representatives, municipal officials, and community members. This approach allowed them to reconstruct the lived sequence of development initiatives in Mogadishu—planning, implementation, monitoring, and continuity—and to trace how perceptions of involvement shifted across each stage.

Thematic analysis of the interview material revealed a striking pattern: participation in Mogadishu is stage-specific and context-dependent. Participants most consistently identified early planning and priority-setting as the critical entry point. When residents were consulted before budgets were drafted and objectives were fixed, projects were perceived to align far more closely with local needs. Once that window closed, later opportunities for involvement tended to produce weaker effects, because the fundamental direction of the initiative had already been decided. In other words, consultation after the fact could inform communities about decisions, but it rarely changed them.

The implementation stage emerged as the phase that converted consultation into something more durable: cooperation. Participants described how involving residents during execution encouraged local contributions of labor, materials, and local knowledge, and enabled practical problem-solving when obstacles arose on the ground. In a city where formal institutional capacity is limited, this community-level improvisation appears to function as an informal resilience mechanism, keeping projects moving through disruptions that would otherwise stall them. The researchers found that implementation-phase participation transformed residents from passive beneficiaries into active partners with a stake in the outcome.

Community monitoring, by contrast, presented a more complicated picture. Participants regarded resident oversight of ongoing projects as valuable for accountability and quality control, yet the study found that monitoring was the least consistently institutionalized stage of participation. Where mechanisms for community-based monitoring existed, they were often informal, dependent on individual goodwill rather than embedded procedures. The authors suggest that this gap represents one of the most promising targets for reform, because sustained monitoring with transparent reporting could extend the benefits of early participation across the entire life cycle of a project.

The study also mapped the conditions that enable or constrain participation, and the results read as a diagnostic checklist for anyone working in fragile urban settings. Transparent communication, inclusive representation, institutional responsiveness, and trust emerged as the strongest enablers of engagement. Conversely, inadequate information, socioeconomic pressures on households, unequal inclusion of marginalized groups, limited institutional capacity, mistrust between communities and authorities, and persistent security constraints all weakened participation. In Mogadishu, where security considerations shape daily movement and where trust in public institutions remains fragile, these barriers are not abstract—they determine who shows up, who speaks, and whose concerns are recorded.

Perhaps the most sobering finding concerns the depth of participation itself. Drawing on the established typology of participatory development, the researchers observed that participation in Mogadishu occurred mainly through consultation and collaboration. Evidence of full community control over decisions and resources—the highest rung of the participation ladder—was limited. Residents were frequently asked for their views, and sometimes invited to work alongside implementing agencies, but they rarely held final authority over budgets, design choices, or resource allocation. This distinction matters theoretically: the study extends participatory development theory by showing that consultation produces stronger perceived benefits precisely when community input demonstrably affects decisions and is sustained through implementation and monitoring, rather than ending at the town-hall stage.

The authors are careful about the limits of their evidence. Because the study relies on stakeholder accounts rather than objective project indicators or a counterfactual design, its findings concern perceived relationships and mechanisms, and they do not establish causal effects. A community that feels ownership of a water project, for example, may report better outcomes even if measured service metrics are unchanged. Still, in a context where reliable administrative data are scarce, systematically gathering the perceptions of those closest to the projects provides an evidence base that conventional evaluations often miss, and it illuminates the mechanisms through which participation is thought to work.

The ethical architecture of the research reflects the sensitivity of the setting. The study protocol was reviewed and approved by the SIMAD University Institutional Review Board, and all participants provided informed consent before data collection. Written consent was documented through signed forms where participants were comfortable signing; where anonymity or security concerns made signing risky, verbal consent was documented instead. Participation was voluntary, withdrawal carried no penalty, and all responses were anonymized. These procedures underscore a broader point for the field: conducting rigorous social research in fragile cities requires methodological flexibility without compromising the protection of human participants.

The practical implications are concrete. The authors recommend early participatory planning as the non-negotiable first step, paired with documented feedback loops so communities can see how their input shaped final decisions. Inclusive project committees, deliberately structured to bring marginalized voices to the table, would address the unequal inclusion that participants identified as a persistent barrier. Finally, community-based monitoring with transparent reporting would institutionalize the oversight role that residents already value but rarely get to perform systematically. For Mogadishu, and for other post-conflict cities wrestling with how to make aid and municipal investment stick, the message is clear: sustainable development is not something delivered to communities, but something built with them, beginning on the very first day of planning and continuing long after the ribbon is cut. The research was supported by SIMAD University, and the article is available open access, making its insights accessible to the practitioners, municipal officials, and community organizers who need them most.

Subject of Research: Community participation in sustainable development in Mogadishu, Somalia

Article Title: Exploring the role of community participation in promoting sustainable development in Mogadishu, Somalia

Article References: Hussein, F. J., Addan, O. A., & Ahmed, H. I. (2026). Exploring the role of community participation in promoting sustainable development in Mogadishu, Somalia. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04881-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04881-4

Keywords: community participation, sustainable development, Mogadishu, Somalia, participatory governance, post-conflict cities, qualitative research, community monitoring, stakeholder interviews, fragile states, urban development, Discover Sustainability

The relationship between the urban environment and public health is one of the most robustly established findings in modern epidemiology. The quality of housing, the design of transport infrastructure, the availability of green space and the walkability of neighbourhoods all measurably influence the risk that residents will develop life-threatening conditions. Poorly connected communities with limited access to parks and active travel options show elevated rates of obesity, cardiovascular disease, respiratory illness and several cancers. Yet despite decades of evidence, improving urban environments as a preventative public health measure remains extraordinarily complex, because it demands coordinated action from multiple actors with different mandates, budgets and priorities. Planning authorities, housing developers, transport agencies and health services each hold only part of the levers required to create healthier places, and no single organisation bears the full cost of the diseases that bad design can produce.

It is precisely this fragmentation that the researchers set out to address. To assess how economic evidence could support more integrated decision-making, the team conducted 167 qualitative interviews with key stakeholders drawn from across England’s urban development system, spanning national and local government, private industry and civil society. The interviews explored in depth how the HAUS tool could support collaboration and informed decision-making across sectors that rarely share a common evidence base or a common metric of success. What emerged was a striking consensus: stakeholders recognised the value of HAUS as a new way to support shared decision-making and to create incentives for organisations to work together toward better health outcomes, precisely because it assigns an economic value to impacts that have historically been invisible in development appraisals.

The technical core of HAUS is a valuation model that links specific features of the environment to health outcomes and their associated economic costs. The tool quantifies and monetises changes in disease occurrence and premature mortality linked with different urban development interventions and affecting local populations. In practical terms, a proposal to add walkable streets, expand green infrastructure or improve housing quality can be assessed not only in terms of construction costs and property values, but also in terms of the expected reduction in NHS treatment costs, productivity losses and the broader societal burden of illness. By translating health outcomes into economic terms, the tool helps decision-makers grasp the long-term value of healthier urban environments and supports more informed investment and planning decisions that might otherwise be dismissed on short-term financial grounds.

The tool did not appear from nowhere. It was initially developed during an earlier research pilot and was further refined throughout the project in collaboration with the UK’s Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, giving it an unusually direct route from academic prototype to policy application. That collaboration has now borne institutional fruit: the ministry has adopted HAUS in its appraisal guides for local authorities, embedding health valuation into the standard machinery of English planning assessment. For a field in which public health arguments have long struggled to compete with housing delivery targets and economic growth imperatives, this represents a significant shift in what evidence counts when the future of a city is decided.

Dr Andrew Barnfield, Senior Lecturer in public health at the University of East London and co-author of the study, emphasised that the tool changes what decision-makers are able to see. ‘The HAUS tool enables decision makers to account for health costs that are linked with the urban environment,’ he said. ‘As our work shows, this is vital for making healthier and more equitable places.’ The equity dimension matters because the health burden of poor urban design falls disproportionately on disadvantaged communities, which are more likely to live near major roads, in lower-quality housing and with limited access to green space. By making these costs explicit, HAUS gives advocates for those communities a quantitative argument that resonates in boardrooms and town halls alike.

Professor Sarah Ayres, from the University of Bristol’s School for Policy Studies, framed the development as a genuine methodological milestone. ‘The collaboration between TRUUD and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government has created a version of the Health Appraisal of Urban Systems model which is to be used for housing, community and local government interventions,’ she said. ‘For the first time, there are now methods to quantify and value the potential health impacts of urban interventions for specific populations.’ The reference to TRUUD, the research consortium on urban health decarbonisation and decision-making of which the three universities are part, underlines the scale of the effort required to move such tools from theory into the working routines of government.

Dr Geoff Bates, from the University of Bath’s Institute for Policy Research, argued that the economic framing is not a concession to fiscal orthodoxy but a strategic necessity. ‘Making the economic case to pursue preventative policies is one way that can persuade policymakers to act to improve long-term health and wellbeing,’ he said. ‘Improving policymaker access to evidence and tools like HAUS that demonstrate the savings to the public purse from investing in healthier housing and urban environments is a step towards improving public health.’ The logic is familiar from other domains of preventative policy: the costs of disease are diffuse and delayed, while the costs of intervention are immediate and concentrated, and only tools that render future savings visible can rebalance that asymmetry in political decision-making.

The findings arrive at a moment when the pressures on urban systems are intensifying. Rising obesity rates, an ageing population, persistent air pollution and the health impacts of climate change all converge on the built environment, and health services across the developed world are increasingly looking upstream toward prevention. The researchers conclude that HAUS provides valuable evidence to encourage cross-sector collaboration and to embed preventative public health into urban development decisions, shifting the question from whether cities can afford to prioritise health to whether they can afford not to. If the tool’s adoption by national government spreads through local authority practice, the healthier city may cease to be an aspiration and become, at last, an audited line in the appraisal.

Subject of Research: Economic valuation of public health impacts in urban development decision-making

Article Title: Economic tool could help cities prioritize public health in urban development

Article References: Economic tool could help cities prioritize public health in urban development. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: urban development, public health, HAUS tool, economic valuation, planning policy, prevention, health equity, built environment, stakeholder interviews, England, University of East London, ministry adoption