Tackling the Root causes Upstream of Unhealthy Urban Development - or TRU3D (pronounced ‘TRUE-D’) - has been awarded £6.6 million (£10M total project costs) over 5 years, and will research two major city/city regions’ urban planning and development systems with a view to embedding the prevention of risk factors associated with non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and health inequalities in decision-making on planning.

TRU3D aims to understand how prevention of NCDs might be fully considered and factored in to the decision-making of those in control of the quality of our urban environments, focusing on major new infrastructure and critical, unresolved issues of governance (e.g. transport and air pollution, nature in cities).

Working with senior decision-makers, related stakeholders and advisors at national, regional and city level we will identify critical decision-making contexts (e.g. land disposal, procurement, regulation, economics), then develop and test intervention case studies.

The umbrella output will be a systems-wide decision-support framework that sets out the systemic blockages identified and incorporates targeted industry-driven improvements to existing processes alongside decision-support tools.

In addition to exploring existing decisions, structures and processes (e.g. the role of economic valuation in decision-making, alternative decision and valuation mechanisms, legal mechanisms such as Social Value Act), we will seek to understand the systemic blockages inhibiting improvement in health outcomes (e.g. corporate structures, values, incentives).

Visit the University of Bristol project page to find out more.