Imagining Healthy and Smart Cities of the Future – Building Towards Systemic and High Dimensional Change, a New Framework

As cities around the world continue to grow, new ways of thinking and the implementation of innovative solutions are required to solve the many complex problems that are being identified. Attend this conference to learn more about today’s challenges and potential solutions for healthy cities, where we can all live, work and play.

About the Conference

This conference is hosted by the Implementing Smart Cities to Build Healthy Cities (SMART) Training Platform, funded by CIHR, NSERC and SSHRC. The programming was developed in collaboration with the Healthy Cities Implementation Science (HCIS) team grant recipients.  SMART aims to equip the next generation of researchers to implement successful, scalable, and enduring solutions to healthy city challenges facing growing urban centres of all sizes in Canada and globally.

Conference session topics and posters will span many areas related to healthy cities, including implementation science, convergence-by-design, food and health, Indigenous issues and equity, aging and chronic disease, transportation and housing, an d training and policy. Join us November 1st to 3rd for our virtual event consisting of three afternoons! This event will be held in a eastern standard time zone.

The objectives of the annual conference included:

• To foster an interdisciplinary and intersectoral community of practice among researchers, trainees, practitioners and knowledge users interested in healthy cities
• To transfer of knowledge of current issues, research and potential solutions related to healthy cities.
• To identify emerging priorities for healthy cities and research questions and training opportunities

Conference session topics and posters will span many areas related to healthy cities, including implementation science, convergence-by-design, food and health, Indigenous issues, and equity, aging and chronic disease, transportation and housing, and training and policy.

This conference is hosted by the Implementing Smart Cities to Build Healthy Cities (SMART) Training Platform, funded by CIHR, NSERC and SSHRC. The programming was developed in collaboration with the Healthy Cities Implementation Science (HCIS) team grant recipients. SMART aims to equip the next generation of researchers to implement successful, scalable, and enduring solutions to healthy city challenges facing growing urban centres of all sizes in Canada and globally.

About Our Sessions

Session One: CIHR Remarks and Opening Keynote with William Dietz

Opening Remarks on behalf of CIHR’s Healthy Cities Research Initiative by Dr. Katherine Frohlich.

Keynote: Climate change, the food supply chain, and transportation systems are intimately related to rates of chronic diseases. Furthermore, every human and planetary system has been or will be affected by climate change. In 2019, we published a Lancet Report entitled The Global Syndemic of Obesity, Undernutrition, and Climate Change. The global syndemic characterizes the interaction of these three pandemics in time and place with deleterious effects on each other. The syndemic perspective provides opportunities to solutions to address all three pandemics by a focus on the their deep systemic drivers. For example, the agricultural system that promotes cattle production and consumption contributes to climate change via methane and nitrous oxide, both powerful greenhouse gases (GHGs), and beef consumption contributes to ill health. Reliance on motorized transport relies on fossil fuels which generate GHGs. Increased GHGs reduce crop yields and micronutrient content of foods, thereby contributing to nutrition insecurity and undernutrition. Reversing these syndemics requires changing individual diet and transportation behaviors, the systems that sustain them, and the deeper drivers that affect them. The short and long term success of public health programs must account for and mitigate the effects of climate change.

Session Two: Small Steps for Big Changes: Implementing an Evidence-Based Diabetes Prevention Program into Diverse Urban Communities

Six million Canadians are at risk for developing type 2 diabetes (T2D). Laboratory based diabetes prevention programs have not been effective when translated into community settings due to their low-quality delivery and inability to reach people in the community who need it most. Small Steps for Big Changes is a diet and exercise counselling intervention that significantly reduces the risk of developing T2D. Designed for feasible, scalable, and sustainable implementation into communities, Small Steps for Big Changes is delivered by community-dwelling peers to ensure the content is ethnoculturally relevant. The next phase of research is to test the implementation of this program where T2D rates are high and diabetes prevention programs remain inaccessible. In partnership with YMCAs in Canada and Australia spanning 8 provinces and the state of Queensland, we are well-positioned to evaluate the implementation and effectiveness of Small Steps for Big Changes across 16 urban municipalities. In this presentation, the Principal Investigator, Dr. Jung, will be joined by the research team, Small Steps for Big Changes alumni, and community partners to provide an overview of the program and its history, and the plan for its future expansion. This talk will cover topics related to implementation, effectiveness, and evaluation while hearing from client, managerial, and research perspectives.

Session Three: Supporting Healthy Lifestyle choices to promote mental health and wellbeing in Indigenous youth aging out of care to urban settings

Positioning Indigenous-led Implementation Science to build and adapt strengths-based interventions and culturally based wellbeing indicators for Indigenous youth (IY) aging-out-of-care in Canada and Australia.

Session Four: Choose to Move from Start up to Scale Up: Working with partners to adapt a health promoting program to meet the needs of diverse older adults

In this session the team will convene an Implementation Science Team in Healthy Aging panel to discuss and explore various topics.

Session Five: Reimagining Naturally Occurring Retirement Communities (NORCs) for 21st Century Cities: What Works Best to Support Older Adults to Age in Place?

In this session, we will start thinking about ‘Aging in Place’ as part of the Reimagining Naturally Occurring Retirement Communities (NORCs) for 21st Century Cities project. Conducted in partnership with various organizational and municipal stakeholders such as the NORC Innovation Center at UHN, the City of Toronto, and City of Barrie, we aim to identify new solutions to support aging in place by enhancing NORCs with on-site health services and social support, delivered in-person and virtually. This will be achieved by implementing enhanced NORC models at 10 sites across two cities (8x Toronto; 2x Barrie). We will showcase how we will employ and examine models of various intensities throughout the project, from a low-intensity model leveraging existing resources to high-intensity models that provide more structural support, to determine which model intensity optimally balances effectiveness, sustainability, as well as health and well-being for those in later life.

Session Six: Understanding how to Attract, Adapt, IMplement and Sustain an evidence-informed fall prevention exercise program in Community Settings: The AAIMS project

Dr. Danielle Bouchard, lead investigator on the AAIMS project, will provide a brief summary and the underlying rationale for the AAIMS project, which aims to improve access to fall-prevention exercise programs for aging adults across Canada. Following this, the four principal applicants on the grant (Dr. Shilpa Dogra, Dr. Kathryn Sibley, Dr. Danielle Bouchard, and Dr. Scott Kehler) will each present the rationale, proposed methodology, and implications of their respective portion of the project.  

Session Seven: CapaCITY/É Accelerating a dramatic increase in sustainable transportation in Canada for generations to come

This session will describe the CapaCITY/É research program and early research that is beginning to shape our understanding of implementation science for healthy cities. The presentation will involve a mix of presentations, interactive work, and self-reflection.

Session Eight: Closing Keynote, SMART Training Platform Panel: Implementation and Convergence for Success!

Keynote Session: The Post-Pandemic City Although we can explain the way centripetal and centrifugal forces determine the form and function of contemporary cities, our abilities to predict their futures are severely limited. The pandemic has led to changes in locational and travel behaviour as well as regulated lockdowns with respect to where people work, live and social distance from one another. This makes it impossible to predict a ‘new normal’ reflecting ways we are able to control and manage the pandemic. As we have little data pertaining to this future, to engage in informed discussion, we develop a hypothetical city organized around theories of spatial interaction, urban hierarchy, density, and heterogeneity of movement. We propose a symmetric square grid of locations, simulate the interactions using gravitational models, and then lock it down. We release the lockdown in the transition to a new normal, assuming different parameter values controlling the effects of distance, illustrating the difficulty of generating highly decentralised city forms. We apply the model to London, locking down the metropolis, and exploring seven functional forms that provide us with a sample of different city shapes and densities. Our approach provides a framework for speculating about the future using what we call ‘computable thought experiments’. The science that we develop contributes to the debate about what the healthy city should look like in post-pandemic world. Panel Discussion: Implementation and Convergence for Success IN ALL DIMENSIONS!

The ideals of Healthy Cities are many and this years program included multiple sessions highlighting current challenges and opportunities facing urban centres. These sessions included topics on health care and diabetes, Indigenous youth health, health promotion in older populations, improving the built environment of retirement communities, reducing falls in older populations and sustainable transportation. This final session will explore and examine the role of implementation science and research in supporting the success of large-scale initiatives and how convergence by design may help bring about greater synergies for long term success of healthy cities initiatives.