Place matters: A new era for health and sustainability research

Professor Nik Lomax discusses the importance of place as the foundation for a new data service.

Ask someone where they were born, brought up, or where they come from, and they will likely tell you about a place, with all the emotional and social ties that it evokes.

Ask them where they live, and they will tell you about a place that represents their day-to-day experience: their city, town or village, their neighbourhood, their street and even their house.

These aren’t just points on a map – places are living, breathing environments that shape our health, wellbeing and future.

More than just buildings and boundaries

Places are complex systems. A neighbourhood isn’t just a collection of buildings, but an ever-changing environment where community interactions, economic opportunities, nature, history and cultural practices all work together to create unique social experiences.

Yet these same places can also reveal stark inequalities – from access to healthcare and transport to the availability of green space and high-quality affordable food.

When studying places, you’ll find they can’t be siloed into neat academic disciplines.

In 2010, the landmark Marmot Review set a policy objective to “create and develop healthy and sustainable places and communities”. It recognised that achieving this goal required understanding and action across numerous areas. Active travel, good-quality space, the food environment and the energy efficiency of housing all play a part. This is still true today.

The challenge: How to improve places and reduce inequalities?

The statistics tell a compelling story:

Road collisions account for 1,700 deaths annually

Air pollution contributes to 28,000-36,000 deaths each year

Cardiovascular disease, at a 14-year high in the UK, accounts for one in four premature deaths

These challenges don’t exist in isolation. Our mobility systems affect air quality, which impacts public health. Our food choices influence both personal wellbeing and environmental sustainability. Everything connects through place, and that’s where HASP comes in.

Introducing HASP: the future of place-based insights

The Healthy and Sustainable Places Data Service (HASP), launching in January 2025, represents a groundbreaking approach to understanding and improving our communities.

The new data service is part of a new £30m investment by Smart Data Research UK. And in our case, we are also delighted to have financial support from the University of Leeds.

HASP will build upon ten years of expertise, gained via the Consumer Data Research Centre. Over the past decade, the team has specialised in the access, curation, secure storage and utilisation of smart data.

We’ll focus on helping researchers to understand healthy and sustainable mobility, lifestyles and food by providing researchers access to diverse and high-quality smart data in these domains. For example:

Connected vehicle data

By analysing how people actually drive, we can understand how road design and city layout influence driving habits, and design safer, more efficient urban infrastructure.

Wearable technology

Fitness trackers and smartwatches help us understand how people move around and exercise. These devices show us how the design of streets, neighbourhoods, and public spaces affects whether people choose to walk or ride bicycles.

Consumer behaviour

Store loyalty cards and purchase records show what types of food people are actually buying. By analysing this information, we can check how people’s diets compare to recommended nutrition standards and environmental sustainability goals.

Researchers using HASP will also benefit from contextual information about access to good quality food and other infrastructure. This will provide insights into the human-environmental systems where people live and help explain why outcomes and behaviours vary between places.

Responsible innovation at the core

HASP isn’t just about collecting data – it’s about using it responsibly and ethically. We maintain rigorous ethical standards to:

Protect the privacy of individuals

Address data bias

Ensure that research teams have the expertise to deliver high-impact work

Join the HASP community

It’s an exciting time to be launching HASP. There’s such richness of available data to understand place-based disparities and the willingness of data owners to work with us. There is also increasing recognition of the value that data-intensive research can have on shaping evidence-based policy.

We can’t wait to get started. Until then, join us on LinkedIn and look out for our launch.