Case studies

By exploring how other places and projects have achieved healthy urban development, we understand what might work in our own communities.

Healthy Urban Development Case Studies

The case studies below are part of a project that sought to understand how property professionals perceive ‘healthy’ development. We searched widely for projects that aimed to promote health and reviewed all of the information that we could find about these cases. The summary stories below are not necessarily posted as ‘best practice’, but they each have interesting lessons and some are inspiring examples of healthy urbanism.

Read more on the methods for the case study review

Pond and new housing at Barton Park. Image: Helen Pineo 2021.

Barton Park

Providing 885 new homes and community services, the Barton Park development is an extension to Barton, a neighbourhood of around…

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Bullitt Center. Image: Helen Pineo, 2019

Bullitt Center

The Bullitt Center office building in Seattle, USA pioneered deep green design methods that pushed the boundaries of sustainable architecture….

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Ebbsfleet Garden City. Image: Ebbsfleet Development Corporation.

Ebbsfleet Garden City

Ebbsfleet is a government-sponsored new ‘Garden city’, the first in the UK for over 100 years, located in the South…

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New playground at Folkets Park. Image: Kenneth A. Balfelt.

Folkets Park

Nørrebro, one of the most densely populated, diverse, and disadvantaged neighbourhoods in Copenhagen, is home to Folkets Park (literally, “People’s…

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Shared spaces encourage social interaction at Grow Community. Image: Helen Pineo, 2019.

Grow Community

Grow Community is a planned residential community of 142 homes on an 8-acre site on Bainbridge Island in Washington State,…

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Mariposa apartments. Image: Denver Housing Authority.

Mariposa

Mariposa is located on the site of a former public housing project in Denver, Colorado. The project is a master…

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Nightingale Anstey. Image: Kate Longley, Nightingale Housing

Nightingale Housing

Nightingale 1 is a ‘social experiment’. The apartment building in an inner-city suburb of Melbourne is the first completed example…

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Park 20|20. Image: Delta Development 4

Park 20|20

Park 20|20 is the first Cradle-to-Cradle ® (C2C) urban development project in the Netherlands, trailblazing design approaches that minimise resource…

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Outdoor eating at Brooks Sports Headquarters Building (Stone34). Image credit: LMN Architects

Stone34

Stone34 is a five-storey, mixed-use commercial building in Seattle, USA on Stone Way between 34th and 35th streets in the…

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Sun Valley. Image: Denver Housing Authority

Sun Valley

Sun Valley is a neighbourhood being redeveloped by the Denver Housing Authority to ‘create a new model of community transformation…

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Via Verde Housing Complex, Bronx, NY - Designed by Grimshaw Architects and Dattner Architects.

Via Verde

The Via Verde project was a response to several challenges for the South Bronx community of New York City: lack…

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After intervention. Image: URBEL

Vila Viva

Vila Viva is a large-scale urban renewal programme across 12 informal settlements in the city of Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Using…

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