The ULI Building Healthy Places Initiative is leveraging the power of ULI’s global networks to shape projects and places in ways that improve the health of people and communities.

Available Now: Building Healthy Places Toolkit

ULI’s Building Healthy Places Initiative has just released the highly anticipated Building Healthy Places Toolkit: Strategies for Enhancing Health in the Built Environment. The toolkit provides 21 evidence-based recommendations, each with a set of action-oriented strategies, across three categories: physical activity, healthy food and drinking water, and healthy environment and social well-being.

Recommendations include:

• Incorporate a mix of land uses
• Provide infrastructure to support biking
• Design visible, enticing stairs to encourage everyday use
• Accommodate a grocery store
• Support on-site gardening and farming
• Ban smoking
• Facilitate social engagement

Learn more.

Health Highlighted at ULI Midwinter Meeting

Health is a global issue, and cities around the world are struggling with increasing rates of chronic disease, partly attributable to the built environment. At the ULI Midwinter Meeting in Paris, Sir Malcolm Grant, chair of the National Health Service of England, and Margaret Wylde, chair of the ULI Building Healthy Places Advisory Group, gave remarks on the current health challenges facing communities and strategies to overcome these challenges. Learn more.

Design Strategies to Enhance Housing, Improve Health

The physical design of space can create social connections, enhance quality of life, provide access to amenities, improve safety, and reduce stress. All of these factors can also improve health outcomes. This Urban Land article outlines 11 design strategies to build community within all types of housing projects. Learn more.

RWJF Pledges Another $500 Million over Ten Years to Fight Childhood Obesity

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has committed an additional $500 million to expand its efforts to reverse the trend of childhood obesity in the United States, including making healthy food and beverages readily available and affordable in all neighborhoods, ensuring healthier school environments, and increasing daily opportunities for physical activity. RWJF is supporting ULI’s work on healthy corridors. Learn more.