Health Driven Design for Cities (HD4)

HD4: Health-Driven Design for Cities (HD 4) is a groundbreaking Singapore-based research collaboration seeking to discover how best to design urban environments that enhance the health of their residents. HD4 is a partnership between Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) the National University of Singapore (NUS), and the University of Cambridge. It has received funding from the National Research Foundation, Singapore, and is hosted and co-led by the Cambridge Centre for Advanced Research and Education in Singapore (CARES).

HD₄ will convene a world-leading team of epidemiologists, clinicians, scientists, engineers, and architects to investigate how individuals move in space and time in Singapore, their corresponding exposure to risk factors that intersect with urban environments, and how this influences their behaviour.

The programme will work hand-in-hand with the SG100K cohort study to overlay information about environmental and behavioural factors on the cohort, enabling the links between these factors and health outcomes to be studied and support the ongoing analysis of the cohort beyond the time frame of the programme.

Research areas

HD₄ will undertake research in the following key areas:
– characterising the features of the environment that potentially impact health in Singapore;
– understanding the links between environmental factors, individual behaviour and health outcomes;
– observing the impact of environmental change on health in Singapore;
– simulating the impact of potential changes on the health of Singaporeans;
– working with government agencies to co-develop data-rich public health tools

The programme’s engagement with government stakeholders will support active knowledge transfer and iterative co-creation throughout the programme, seeking opportunities to observe the impact of previous policies to maximise the health potential of Singapore and to feed into future policies.

HD₄‘s projected impacts to Singapore

The scientific techniques, technologies, tools, and knowledge from HD4 will create a comprehensive systems view of how the urban environment affects population health and will provide a basis for the evaluation of the impact on health outcomes of changes to the environment.. The programme will enrich the talent pool in Singapore by training the next generation of researchers, supplemented with international expertise, to create an innovative interdisciplinary research ecosystem. HD4 will provide the basis for a data-rich public health framework, supporting the development of a healthy Singapore.

This research is supported by the National Research Foundation, Prime Minister’s Office, Singapore under its Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE) programme. 

Publications

• Xu, L., Bardhan, R., Mei, H., Gopalakrishnan, S., Zheng, X., & Schroepfer, T. (2025). Harnessing street shade to mitigate heat stress: An in-situ parallel investigation under extreme heat conditions in tropical Singapore. Science of the Total Environment, 958, 177864. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2024.177864