Urban Transitions

Urban Transitions 2024

5 - 7 November 2024 | Melia Sitges, Sitges, Spain

This conference is organised by Elsevier and supported by ISGlobal (Instituto de Salud Global Barcelona)

Integrating urban and transport planning, environment and health for healthier urban living

Urban Transitions 2024 aims to promote healthy urban development by bringing together different disciplines working within cities.

Meet world leading experts on urban and transport planning, architecture, environmental exposure assessment, environmental epidemiology, physical activity, climate change, and public health and governance to discuss current challenges and solutions.

Present your research at Urban Transitions 2024: abstracts are invited by 24 May 2024.

Author benefits include the opportunity to include a recording of your talk in the video journal Science Talks.

Submit your abstract

Scope of the conference

The majority of people live in cities and urbanization is continuing worldwide. Cities have long been known to be society’s predominant engine of innovation and wealth creation, yet they are also a main source of pollution and disease. There has been a transition to non communicable diseases (NCDs) in many low and medium income countries, partly due to urbanization and related environmental exposures and lifestyles. Furthermore, climate change is a driver for change. Cities are often characterized by high levels of environmental exposures such as air pollution and noise, heat island effects and lack of green space and physical activity levels.

Emerging evidence suggests that (poor) urban and transport planning may be to a large extent responsible for this and may have a large impact on mortality and morbidity in cities. Furthermore the impacts are not equally distributed among the population with the more the more deprived often suffering disproportionately.

The Sustainable Development Goals and the New Urban Agenda have given new impetus to improve our cities. Paradigms such as sustainable cities, liveable cities, resilient cities, smart cities and healthy cities have been promoted successfully by different communities, but need more alignment to make systematic improvements to cities. New concepts such as car free cities, compact cities, low carbon cities and nature based solutions and new technologies such as electric vehicles and (shared) autonomous vehicles have been introduced and may improve the urban environment and thereby health.

Decision-makers need not only better data on the complexity of factors in environmental and developmental processes affecting human health, but also enhanced understanding of the linkages to be able to know at which level to target their actions. Cities have come to the forefront of providing solutions for issues such as climate change, which has co-benefits on health, but still need better knowledge. City organisations (for example C40, Healthy Polis, ICLEI) play an important role.

Multi-sectorial and multi-disciplinary approaches are needed to tackle the current problems and therefore we have organized an international conference with world leading experts on urban and transport planning, architecture, environmental science and exposures, physical activity, climate change, public health to discuss the current status and challenges and solutions in cities.

The objective of the conference is to promote healthy urban development by bringing together different sectors and disciplines (e.g. urban and transport planning, architecture, green space management, environmental exposure assessment, environmental epidemiology, physical activity, climate change, and public health and governance) working within cities and presenting the state of the art research and providing solutions to and future healthy visions of our cities.