On World Cities Day 31 October 2025, the World Health Organization (WHO) released Taking a Strategic Approach to Urban Health: A Guide for Decision Makers—a global call to action urging national and city leaders to transform urban spaces into engines of health, equity, and safety.
By 2050, nearly 70 percent of the global population will live in cities. Whether these urban areas become thriving communities or unsafe environments will depend on decisions we take today. The new WHO Guide offers a roadmap that connects health, safety, and sustainability in practical, actionable ways. It reminds us that urban health is not a narrow health concern—it is the foundation for social stability and public safety.
If you get it wrong, cities are not only unhealthy but also unsafe.
Over 1.1 billion people already live in informal settlements with inadequate housing, sanitation, and security. Informal settlement dwellers experience the worst health and safety outcomes due to being exposed to floods, heat, crime, traffic injuries, and domestic violence. The link is not debatable: where the environment is unsafe, health deteriorates; where health declines, young people experience immense trauma growing up in these communities with high levels of post-traumatic stress disorder, and often social instability follows.
Health and safety are two sides of the same coin. Clean air reduces both disease and road crashes by promoting walking and cycling. Green spaces lower non-communicable disease rates while deterring crime. Safe transport systems prevent injuries, connect people to jobs, and build social cohesion. The fastest way to build safer societies is to embed safety in every urban-health decision.
From strategy to action
WHO’s new framework calls for “strategic action” on urban health. But strategy alone is not enough; cities need quick, visible wins to build momentum. Here are five things urban leaders, civil society, and the private sector can do now—well before new infrastructure or budgets are approved:
- Make community voices central. In Nairobi’s Dandora, residents co-designed cleaner, safer public spaces. In Suva and Makassar, community-led mapping reduced flood and crime risks. Every city can replicate this participatory model in months—not years—by reallocating existing community-engagement budgets.
- Reclaim public spaces for safety. Simple environmental changes—better lighting, marked pedestrian routes, and managed parks—reduce both violence and injury. Evidence from Latin America shows that public-space improvements cut assault rates within a year.
- Integrate data for early action. Most cities already collect fragmented health, crime, and transport data. Creating a shared “urban-safety dashboard” can identify hotspots where interventions yield the greatest impact. Quick integration of existing datasets costs far less than new programs.
- Prioritise active mobility. Low-cost cycling lanes, school-zone redesigns, and traffic-calming measures can dramatically lower child injury rates and emissions within months. Road safety is a fast, measurable proxy for overall urban safety.
- Strengthen cross-sector leadership. Appointing a single Urban Health and Safety Coordinator—with authority to convene health, transport, policing, housing, and climate departments—can unlock the joined-up governance WHO calls for. The title matters less than the mandate to break silos and act fast.
Safety 2026 Conference: A Platform for Immediate Collaboration
These priorities align with the upcoming 16th World Conference on Injury Prevention and Safety Promotion (Safety 2026), hosted in Cape Town from 2-4 September 2026 under the banner #UbuntuUnited for a Safer Future. https://worldsafety.co.za/
Safety 2026 is not another meeting—it is a mobilising moment. It will focus on how urban design and practical interventions can achieve rapid safety gains through small, coordinated urban-health interventions: safer housing designs, pedestrian-first transport, gender-sensitive lighting, and local climate-resilience projects. Each of these reduces both injury and inequity while strengthening community trust.
Presenters will showcase global interventions. Cape Town’s community-safety partnerships and early-warning systems show that progress is possible when residents co-design solutions with government.<