Healthy City Design Congress Voices: Rewarding and recognising excellence in healthy city design

The Awards recognise innovation and excellence in conceptualising, planning, designing and delivering places and infrastructure in the urban environment that create human health and wellbeing, and embed the principles of planetary health and sustainable development.

The suite of eight awards encourage submissions in categories that span the micro, meso and macro levels of city design and planning, including:

• Healthy homes and neighbourhoods
• Regenerative design for the public realm
• Healthy placemaking for community impact
• Healthy workplaces
• Healthy social infrastructure
• Design research for healthy cities
• Healthy transport and mobility
• Healthy city planning and design

In this highlights video from last year’s 2024 HCD Congress in Liverpool, HCD co-founder, Prof Jeremy Myerson describes the purpose, value and impact of the awards, recognising and rewarding excellence and raising standards and aspirations to improve the way we plan and design healthy and sustainable cities and communities.

We also take this moment to remember Prof Lady Rachel Cooper OBE, who sadly passed on 17 July, and appears in this video after being awarded the Healthy City Design 2024 Design Champion Award at last year's congress. As an original member of the HCD programme committee, we will be paying a full and appropriate tribute to Rachel at this year's congress in October.

Organised by SALUS Global Knowledge Exchange and the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, Royal College of Art, in collaboration with Impact on Urban Health and Cities & Health Journal, Healthy City Design 2025 (HCD 2025) International Congress & Exhibition is a global forum for the exchange of knowledge on the research, policy, investment and practice of designing healthy and sustainable cities and communities. This year’s congress will be held at the Lowry, MediaCity in Salford, Greater Manchester, from 14-15^th October.