The Research Problem
Cities worldwide face intertwined challenges: rising non-communicable diseases, climate risks, environmental hazards, and governance complexity. Policymakers need timely, globally comparable policy indicators to spot policy gaps and guide healthier, more sustainable urban development. The Global Observatory of Healthy and Sustainable Cities (GOHSC) provides such indicators, but assessing policy documents across multiple sectors and government levels is slow and labor-intensive, limiting uptake. Leveraging our international network, we will pilot our policy analysis in three diverse cities where WUN members and collaborators have previously analyzed GOHSC policy indicators, including at least one in each of Latin America, Europe, and Oceania. These cross-context analyses and shareable methods will promote the diffusion of policy best practices across regions.
Research Design
We will build a multilingual, open-source web application that turns the GOHSC’s policy indicator checklist, currently an Excel file, into an efficient workflow. This web app will automate the compilation of information for the policy indicator checklist through assessing policy documents, conducting relevance screening, summarizing key information, extracting and categorizing text under the policy checklist’s principles and indicators, and scoring policies for presence and quality (i.e., presence of measurable targets and alignment with evidence-based recommendations). The tool will generate customizable policy reports based on completed checklists, and uploaded policies will be compiled into an open-access urban policy database for transparency and sharing of best practices. We will integrate supervised large language models (LLMs) to expedite document identification, triage, and summarization, while maintaining human-in-the-loop verification to mitigate bias and ensure reliability. This will be the first open-access tool for assessing urban policies against the principles of healthy, sustainable cities across multiple languages (initially English, Spanish, and German), improving global equity in use and potential policy impacts. The project will scale GOHSC’s open-science principles, enable standardized policy indicator assessments for global city comparisons, and reduce time-to-insight from months to days.
Project Objectives
This project aims to reduce barriers to cities’ uptake and use of policy indicators. We will build a multilingual, open-source web application that transforms the GOHSC’s policy indicator tool into an efficient, validated, AI-assisted workflow. This tool will be co-designed with the GOHSC’s international policy indicators working group and piloted across three regions. Expected outcomes include a working web app prototype, a policy brief, and an online workshop to support adoption and global scale-up. The project will reduce assessment time from months to days, expand participation through multilingual access, and enable consistent policy benchmarking across cities.