Urban HEART: Measuring the Health of Toronto’s Neighbourhoods
By Lucas on Mar 03, 2014
Image via Urban HEART
What if there was a tool that could calculate the health of Toronto’s neighbourhoods? The City and other community organizations would be able to establish a more well-rounded and comprehensive growth strategy. Well, it looks like we just might have one!
The Centre for Research on Inner City Health (CRICH) of St. Michael’s Hospital created a tool called Urban HEART (Health Equity Assessment and Response Tool). The tool was adapted from a process that World Health Organization uses to calculate the health of countries. CRICH teamed up with 80 experts from 40 different organizations to come up with a way to make the tool applicable to Toronto’s 140 neighbourhoods.
Urban HEART measures each neighbourhood based on 15 different categories, which are spread out between five different domains:
1) Economic opportunities
2) Social and human development
3) Civic engagement
4) Physical environment and local infrastructure
5) Physical and mental health
The categories range from walkability, to green space, to post-secondary completion, to rates of diabetes, unemployment, and more. Urban HEART scores each category with either green, yellow, or red. Green means that the neighbourhood is performing better than average in this specific category, yellow means it’s average and requires close monitoring, and red means action needs to be taken.
Highlights of Urban HEART’s findings:
Usually, high rates of poverty are found in urban centres, but Toronto’s downtown core is home to its most affluent neighbourhoods. Unemployment rates are actually higher in the inner suburbs.
Lower levels of post-secondary education is closely linked to higher rates of diabetes.
Downtown residents vote more, but even the outer suburbs of Toronto vote more than the rest of Canada on average.
Downtown is the most walkable.
Many high and mixed income neighbourhoods scored low in the physical environment and local infrastructure domain, but this will affect people in these areas differently. Residents of these neighbourhoods may own a car and be able to afford a gym membership.
Top three healthiest neighbourhoods according to the Urban HEART Matrix (based on amount of greens)
1) North Riverdale: 12 greens
2) Kingsway South: 12 greens
3) High Park - Swansea: 11 greens
How does your neighbourhood fare? Click here to find out!
