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.