From Evidence to Impact: Why Aren’t Healthier Places Already the Default?

The Landscape Institute’s From Evidence to Impact: Delivering Healthy Urban Development conference opened with a deceptively simple question: how do we make healthier places the default rather than the exception? 

By the end of the day, what struck me was that we are not short of evidence or good ideas. The real challenge is getting that knowledge into the right conversations early enough to shape decisions and then carrying it through into delivery.

Landscape Institute President Dr Saira Ali FLI set an appropriately collaborative tone, challenging us to think beyond professional and funding silos. A resident does not experience a transport project, a health project, a biodiversity project and a regeneration project, they experience one place. Saira’s message was that we need to join those agendas up, involve communities from the beginning and bring landscape expertise to the table early enough to help shape the decisions, rather than being asked to respond once the main structure is already fixed.



Professor Rosie McEachan, representing Born in Bradford and Healthy Urban Places, reinforced the reason the day mattered. Research and practice need each other: researchers need practitioners and communities to help identify the questions that matter, while practitioners need evidence in a form and at a point in the process where it can genuinely influence decisions. It felt less about one side educating the other and much more about meeting in the middle.

From public health, Professor Kevin Fenton CBE, London’s Regional Director of Public Health and statutory health adviser to the Mayor of London, reminded us that health is shaped by far more than healthcare. Housing, transport, nature, employment, social connection and environmental quality all contribute, making healthy placemaking a responsibility shared well beyond the NHS.

Chris Boardman CBE then made that argument intensely personal, recalling how his daughter asked whether they could cycle to a park just 549 metres from home and he said no because he did not feel the route was safe. His recurring question “What must be true?” became one of my strongest takeaways from the day: start with the outcome we want for people and work backwards to the conditions needed to make it possible.

Roisha Hughes CBE of The National Lottery Heritage Fund brought an important investment and capacity-building perspective, while Saira’s Bradford examples demonstrated the opportunity to treat transport, nature, regeneration, health and public realm as parts of one place rather than separate projects.

In the Creating healthier neighbourhoods session, chaired by Dr Rebecca Geary, the evidence became much more tangible. Professor Ruth Hunter shared 15 years of research around Belfast’s Connswater Community Greenway, looking not simply at what was built, but at what changed afterwards; who used it, how levels of walking and cycling shifted, whether women were using the space differently, and what longer-term benefits emerged for wellbeing, social connection and resilience. Her presentation was also a useful reminder that we need to return to completed places and ask whether the outcomes we promised were actually delivered.

Pete Swift CMLI of Planit approached the challenge from the other end of the project timeline. His deliberately provocative thought that “confidence beats evidence at Stage 0” captured how many of the most important decisions are made before project-specific data can exist. Drawing on work including CyanLines and wider green-infrastructure initiatives in Greater Manchester, he talked about the importance of ambition, precedent, partnerships and finding creative routes through funding and policy to get good ideas moving early.



Tom Walker CMLI of Gillespies brought yet another dimension, reminding us that healthy places are about far more than measurable outputs. Through projects including Bradford City Park, Elephant Park and Mayfield, he explored joy, beauty, nature, seasonal change, day and night, activity and quiet, and the importance of creating places that feel cared for and connected. His point was a simple but important one: if people do not actually want to spend time somewhere, many of the health benefits we hope to achieve will never follow.

My own contribution for Davies White explored children’s shrinking freedom, nature-led play, meaningful engagement and our responsibility to bring nature closer to home. Boardman’s 549-metre story chimed strongly with the Sheffield comparison I shared, where the reported roaming range of an eight-year-old fell from around six miles in 1919 to approximately 300 yards in 2008. If children have fewer opportunities to travel out to nature, perhaps those of us designing neighbourhoods have a greater responsibility to bring nature to them.

One frustration of a really strong conference programme, of course, is that you cannot be in three rooms at once. As I was speaking in the Creating healthier neighbourhoods sessions, I missed two equally important parallel discussions.

Professor Sarah Rogers chaired Health and wellbeing through urban housing development, with Andrew Grant CMLI,  Andy Wallis, James Scott and Adriana Marques, exploring how health and wellbeing can become a fundamental part of housing and city design rather than something considered after the major decisions have been made.

Meanwhile, Professor John Wright chaired Transport’s role in healthy urban landscapes, with Professor Jenna Panter, Sophie Thompson FLI and Duncan Paybody, looking at active travel, urban mobility and the role transport infrastructure can play in supporting healthier lives.

Judging by the conversations afterwards, I missed some excellent material. I would genuinely love to hear the key takeaways from delegates who attended those sessions, perhaps there are another couple of articles still to come.

And those conversations between the sessions mattered too. The coffee breaks, lunch and time throughout the day provided a wonderful opportunity to meet people working on very different parts of the same challenge. Some of my most useful conversations happened away from the lectern; comparing projects, joining up ideas and discovering where research, practice and future collaborations might connect.

The final Fishbowl, chaired by Rosie McEachan, brought everyone back together and raised some of the hardest questions of the day: long-term maintenance, political reversibility, women and girls’ safety, disability, neurodiversity, green gentrification and social prescribing without funding following the referral. Kevin Barton  offered the memorable “Scunthorpe test”: can all of this work in ordinary places, not only in flagship developments or cities with exceptional funding and political support? His point was that the real test of healthy placemaking is whether the same principles can be delivered in everyday towns and neighbourhoods, with ordinary budgets, pressures and constraints.

I was sorry not to get a seat at the table, as I would have loved to share some of my experience working with Nature Sacred in the US. Their Sacred Places use a simple combination of nature, a bench and a small journal tucked beneath it, inviting people to pause, reflect and leave their own thoughts and stories. Over time, those entries become a powerful record of how people connect with nature, one another and the places around them; exactly the kind of lived experience that deserves a place alongside more formal evidence.



Rob Hughes, Chief Executive of the Landscape Institute, closed the day by returning to the importance of partnership between research and practice and the need to turn the day’s conversations into something more than rhetoric. His message was clear: we already know a great deal about what healthier places require; the challenge now is to build stronger partnerships, bring that evidence closer to decision-making, and turn knowledge into action.

A huge thank you should also go to the  Landscape Institute, Healthy Urban Places and Born in Bradford for bringing such a diverse group of people and disciplines together, and to the event sponsors Barcham Trees, DeepRoot Green Infrastructure, eibe play, Proludic UK, Stoneworld and Vestre. Their support matters. Events like this and the conversations, learning and connections they enable, simply could not happen without organisations willing to support them.

I left the day with pages of notes and far more ideas than could sensibly fit into one conference review. So, particularly for those who were unable to attend, over the coming days I’ll share a series of slightly more in-depth reflections on some of the speakers, projects and debates that stayed with me; not simply repeating what was said, but exploring what it might mean for the way we plan, design and deliver healthier places.

My overriding conclusion from the day? We do not primarily lack evidence. We need to become much better at translating it, embedding it early, protecting it through delivery and funding the stewardship that allows healthier places to keep working long after the ribbon has been cut.