UK Biobank Urban Morphometric Platform (UKBUMP): a nationwide resource for evidence-based healthy city planning and public health interventions

Abstract

The built environment (BE) has emerged as one of the ‘first causes’ of chronic disease, capable of explaining its socio-spatial variation. There is an increasing need for objective, detailed and precise measurements of attributes of BE that may influence our lifestyle, behaviour and hence physical and mental health. In this paper, we report the UK Biobank Urban Morphometric Platform (UKBUMP), the first ever very large sample size high resolution spatial database of urban morphological metrics (morphometrics), being developed for half-a-million participants of the UK Biobank Prospective study spatially distributed across 22 UK cities. Large-scale objective assessment of the BE was conducted employing state-of-the-art spatial and network analyses upon multiple national-level spatial data-sets. Prospective large-scale objective assessment of the BE enables the development of BE-health modelling studies that have the potential to identify causal pathways from specific attributes of the BE to various complex chronic health outcomes as well as well-being. The UKBUMP will act as a national resource, providing a platform for evidence-based healthy city planning and interventions for the first half of the twenty-first century.