Bax & Company is a mission-driven agency and a leader in urban innovation for over 30 years with an international team of over 60 multidisciplinary consultants. Our headquarters are in Barcelona, but our work spans across Europe, with offices in Utrecht (NL), Cambridge (UK) and Düsseldorf (DE). We address the greatest societal challenges of today, by working closely with public authorities, research organisations and the private sector to pilot cutting-edge science and technology-enabled innovations in practice and policy.
Cities are pivotal in facilitating improved health and well-being by creating and providing the right physical, social, cultural and economic places and services. Our Healthy Cities team is committed to building a meaningful impact in placemaking. Our collective expertise spans a wide spectrum of fields (urban planning, housing, mobility, greening, climate adaptation, gender & equity), allowing us to approach challenges from diverse angles and to deliver tailored solutions.
We understand urban planning and health as two closely related concepts: health as a planning tool, and the city as a tool for health. This is embodied in the projects we deliver, which lie at the intersection of urbanism and health, between design and evaluation, and between research and practice.
We aim to bridge the gap between theory and practice, ensuring that our work not only contributes to the academic body of knowledge but also brings tangible benefits to the real world. We have supported numerous cities across Europe to leverage the health potential of their urban plans, conducting Health Impact Assessments (Wirral City Council, Public Health Agency of Barcelona), delivering high-level documents such as Urban Health Strategies (Barcelona Provincial Council, Municipality of Subirats), or strategic urban masterplans (Barcelona City Council). We build capacity within local authorities, offering dedicated training and workshops, to promote collaborative, cross-departmental approaches.
- Healthy Cities methodology links the impact on 20 Urban Determinants of Health to 30 health indicators.
- Case study of La Industrial+ project: assessment of existing urban and health situation, defining priority actions, proposed intervention, and final health results.
We have worked closely with governmental and regional planning agencies (UK, Catalonia & Basque Country governments, Metropolitan Transport Authority for Barcelona) to advance the state-of-the-art, conducting further research into healthy urban planning, and providing evidence-based guidance and reports to support decision-making. Lastly, we are committed to the continuous development of the Healthy Cities Generator, a digital tool designed to make it easy for urban planners, health professionals and policymakers to incorporate health factors into urban planning and urban factors into health policy.
In HORUS, we will examine how the urban environment can be a valuable tool to tackle Non-Communicable Diseases’ risk behaviours in vulnerable populations. To do so, we will establish an urban health baseline for each of the three involved cities, based on quantitative urban analyses. We will combine these results with a qualitative analysis of individual behaviours, explored in a series of focus groups and interviews with key stakeholders. Finally, we will integrate these learnings into the Healthy Cities Generator tool, by creating a new module focused on citizen engagement. This addition will enable communities to understand and assess the influence of their neighbourhood’s urban characteristics on their behaviour and overall health & wellbeing.
To find out more and keep up to date with our work, you can follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter or visit our website.