SHUE Database

In urban areas, where population growth is greatest, lies the greatest opportunity to influence development with the goal of enhancing population health within the agenda of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This report describes the development of the Sustainable Healthy Urban Environments (SHUE) database, which provides data to analyse the characteristics of a globally-representative sample of cities. Datasets with data from global cities on the themes of geography, demography & health, environment, housing, energy, transport, and policy, were collated from sources including existing databases of urban characteristics and global land cover and GIS data. A set of 250 cities were randomly sampled from a global universe of cities, stratified by population size, gross national income (GNI), and Bailey’s ecoregion, used here as a proxy for climate, with selection weighted by the availability of data within these existing datasets. A further 59 cities were added to the dataset as interesting comparators based on expert opinion. The available data was aggregated for the cities, and new data were added from various sources, including GIS analyses of spatial and remote-sensed information, and through internet searches, the methods of which are described here. The resultant SHUE database has been used as the basis of a number of publications, and can now be found hosted online for other researchers to use.