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healthysustainablecities / global-indicators

An open-source tool for calculating spatial indicators for healthy, sustainable cities worldwide using open or custom data.
MIT License
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accessibility city city-government health public-health public-transport transport transportation-network urban urban-design urban-planning

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Global Healthy and Sustainable Cities Indicators (global-indicators)

Summary

An open-source tool for measuring, monitoring and reporting on policy and spatial urban indicators for healthy, sustainable cities worldwide using open or custom data. Designed to support participation in the Global Observatory of Healthy and Sustainable Cities' 1000 city challenge, it can be run as code or as an app in your web browser. View the full documentation of the Global Healthy and Sustainable City Indicators software at https://healthysustainablecities.github.io/software/.

This software can be configured to support comparisons within- and between-cities and across time, benchmarking, analysis and monitoring of local policies, tracking progress, and inform interventions towards achieving healthy, equitable and sustainable cities. It also support generating resources including maps, figures and reports in multiple languages, so these can be made accessible for use by local communities and stakeholders as a source of evidence to advocate for change.

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What exactly does this do?

As a result of running the process, a core set of spatial indicators for healthy and sustainable cities are calculated for point locations, a small area grid (e.g. 100m), and overall city estimates. Optionally, indicators can also be calculated for custom areas, like administrative boundaries or specific neighbourhoods of interest. In addition CSV files containing indicators for area summaries and the overall city are also generated, omitting geometry.

The default core set of spatial urban indicators calculated includes:

The tool can also be used to summarise and visualise a policy audit conducted using the 1000 Cities challenge tool.

Generated outputs include:

The resulting city-specific resources can be used to provide evidence to support policy makers and planners to target interventions within cities, compare performance across cities, and when measured across time can be used to monitor progress for achieving urban design goals for reducing inequities. Moreover, they provide a rich source of data for those advocating for disadvantaged and vulnerable community populations, to provide evidence for whether urban policies for where they live are serving their needs.

How to set up and get started?

Software installation and set up

  1. Download and unzip the latest GHSCI software release to a desired project directory on your computer
  2. Install and run Docker Desktop according to the guidelines for your operating system of choice
  3. Run the GHSCI software by opening the project directory where you extracted the software using a command line interface (e.g. Terminal on Windows, Terminal on MacOS, or Bash on Linux):
    • on Windows open the folder in Terminal or cmd.exe and enter .\global-indicators.bat
    • on MacOS/Linux in bash, enter bash ./global-indicators.sh
    • Linux users may need to prefix this with 'sudo' for elevated permissions when launching Docker containers (read more here)

This will retrieve the computational environment and launch the Global Healthy and Sustainable City Indicators (GHSCI) software, along with a PostGIS spatial database that is used for processing and data management. Once launched, instructions will be displayed.

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The software can be used to configure study regions, conduct analysis and generate resources in four ways, depending on preference:

# load the GHSCI software library
import ghsci

# load the example configured region
r = ghsci.example()

# or set a codename for your city, and use it to initialise or load a new region.
# The ghsci.example() is a shortcut for the following, that you could use for your own new study region.
codename = 'example_ES_Las_Palmas_2023'
r = ghsci.Region(codename)

# Once that is completed, you can proceed with analysis
r.analysis()

# and generating resources
r.generate()

# if you've analysed and generated results for other study regions, you can summarise the overall differences
r.compare('another_previously_processed_codename')

# if for some reason you want to drop the database for your study region to start again:
r.drop()

# You will be asked if you really want to do this!  It requires entering "ghscic" to confirm
# This doesn't remove any generated files or folders - you'll have to remove those yourself, if you want to

Overview

The Global Healthy and Sustainable Cities Indicators (GHSCI) tool can be run in a web browser or as Python code (e.g. in Jupyter Lab). Once the software environment has been retrieved and running, analysis for a particular city proceeds in four steps:

  1. Configure study regions
  2. Perform region analysis
  3. Generate resources
  4. Compare results (e.g. impact of hypothetical scenarios and sensitivity analyses, benchmarking between cities or regions of interest, monitoring change across time)

A fully configured example study region is provided along with data for users to familiarise themselves with the workflow and the possibilities of the generated resources. Our website provides detailed directions on how to perform the four-step process, and how to access, run and modify the provided example Jupyter notebook to perform analyses for your own study regions.

Running the provided example

From the launched software prompt, type ghsci to start the web app and click the displayed link to open a web browser at http://localhost:8080

The Global Healthy and Sustainable City Indicators app opens to a tab for selecting or creating a new study region. The software comes with an example configuration for the city of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, that we can see has been Configured but hasn't yet had Analysis perormed or resources Generated. Once two configured regions have had their resources generated, they can be compared. Additionally, the results of a completed policy checklist can be summarised and queried.

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To run the example, click to select 'example_ES_Las_Palmas_2023' in the table, head to the Analysis tab and click the button. While analysis is being conducted, progress will be summarised in the terminal. This may take a few minutes to complete:

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Once completed, the study region summary will have the Analysed check box ticked and if you click to select the example in the table it will display the configured study region boundary on the map:

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Click the study region to view a popup summary of the core set of indicators calculated (spatial distribution data will be generated shortly, and directions for producing an interactive map are provided in the example Jupyter notebook).

To generate the range of resources listed above, with the example city selected navigate to the Generate tab and click the Generate resources button. A series of outputs generated will be reported in the terminal window:

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You can use the Compare function to

As an example of a sensitivity analysis of the urban boundary used for analysis:

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Exit the software

To exit the web application click the exit button in the top right-hand corner. At the end of a Jupyter session, in the menu click File > Shut Down. If you close a browser window with the Jupyter Lab or GHSCI app still running, the underlying server process running these may be interrupted by pressing Control+C at the command prompt.

To run the analysis for your study region visit our website for detailed instructions on how to configure a new study region and what input data is required.

Citations

The software was developed by the Global Healthy and Sustainable City Indicators Collaboration team, an international partnership of researchers and practitioners, extending methods developed by the Healthy Liveable Cities Lab at RMIT University and incorporating functionality from the OSMnx tool developed by Geoff Boeing.

The software may be cited as:

Higgs C, Liu S, Boeing G, Arundel J, Lowe M, Adlakha D et al (2023) Global Healthy and Sustainable City Indicators software. https://doi.org/10.25439/rmt.24760260.v1

The concept underlying the framework is described in:

Liu S, Higgs C, Arundel J, Boeing G, Cerdera N, Moctezuma D, Cerin E, Adlakha D, Lowe M, Giles-Corti B (2022) A Generalized Framework for Measuring Pedestrian Accessibility around the World Using Open Data. Geographical Analysis. 54(3):559-582. https://doi.org/10.1111/gean.12290

The tool was designed to be used for a 25-city comparative analysis, published as:

Boeing G, Higgs C, Liu S, Giles-Corti B, Sallis JF, Cerin E, et al. (2022) Using open data and open-source software to develop spatial indicators of urban design and transport features for achieving healthy and sustainable cities. The Lancet Global Health. 10(6):e907–18. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2214-109X(22)00072-9

The process of scaling up residential analysis of liveability and sustainability indicators for diverse urban contexts is the topic of Carl Higgs' PhD research and is described in:

Higgs, C. et al. (2022) ‘Policy-Relevant Spatial Indicators of Urban Liveability And Sustainability: Scaling From Local to Global’, Urban Policy and Research, 40(4). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/08111146.2022.2076215.

Acknowledgements

This software is an officially sponsored Docker Open Source Software Project (https://hub.docker.com/u/globalhealthyliveablecities). The broader programme of work this software supports received the Planning Institute of Australia's 2023 national award for Excellence in Planning Research.

Our approach, while supporting the optional use of custom data, was founded with an open science ethos and promotes the usage of global open data produced by individuals, organisations and governments including OpenStreetMap Contributors (OpenStreetMap), the European Commission Joint Research Centre (Global Human Settlements Layer), and open data portals in general. We gratefully acknowledge the valuable contributions to transparency, equity and science open data initiatives such as these and the producers of open source software underlying our work bring to the world.

Open source software we have used and which is included in our software environment includes Python (programming language), Docker (software containerisation), Conda (package management), PostgreSQL (database), PostGIS (spatial database), pgRouting (routing analysis), GDAL/OGR (Geospatial Data Abstraction software Library), OSMnx (OpenStreetMap retrieval and network analysis), NetworkX (network analysis), NiceGUI (graphical user interface), Jupyter Lab (scientific code notebooks), Pandas (dataframes), GeoPandas (spatial dataframes), GeoAlchemy (spatial SQL management), SQLAlchemy (SQL management), Pandana (network analysis using pandas), Rasterio (raster analysis), GTFS-Lite (GTFS parsing), Git (source code management), GitHub (development platform), Leaflet and Fabio Crameri's Scientific colour maps.

How to contribute

If you've found an issue or want to request a new feature:

If you want to contribute to a feature: