Global Healthy and Sustainable City Indicators (GHSCI) Policy

Full description

The Global Healthy and Sustainable City Indicators (GHSCI) Policy analysis and reporting tool has been developed as a pilot proof-of-concept application to support and gather feedback from stakeholders participating in the 1000 Cities Challenge of the Global Observatory of Healthy and Sustainable Cities (GOHSC).

Overview

GHSCI Policy is a web application that enables city stakeholders to upload a completed policy checklist audit (Excel .xlsx), automatically score their city's policy indicators, and generate a downloadable PDF report. Reports can be produced in English and local languages to strengthen advocacy and equip policymakers with evidence-informed insights.

Features

• Policy checklist upload — Upload a completed GOHSC policy indicator checklist (.xlsx) to trigger automated processing.
• Automated scoring and PDF report generation — The app processes uploaded checklists and produces a city-level PDF report.
• Real-time status tracking — Report processing status (UPLOADED → PROCESSING → COMPLETED / FAILED) is updated in real time via subscriptions and polling.
• Report management — View, regenerate, and delete your uploaded reports and associated files.
• Example report — Load a pre-built example (Las Palmas, 2023) to explore the tool without your own data.
• Feedback — Submit feedback via the in-app feedback widget; view submitted feedback in the feedback gallery.
• Translation support — Browser-native page translation is supported via a built-in help popover (Chrome/Edge, Firefox, Safari).
• Authentication — Secure sign-in and sign-out powered by Amazon Cognito.

This application is built with React + TypeScript and deployed on AWS Amplify, using:

• Amazon Cognito for user authentication
• AWS AppSync (GraphQL) for the API
• Amazon DynamoDB for report metadata storage
• Amazon S3 for file storage (uploaded .xlsx files, generated PDFs, and report images)
• AWS Lambda (Python) for report processing, drawing on existing functions developed for the desktop Global Healthy and Sustainable Cities (GHSCI) software tool

Development Team

Developed at RMIT University's Centre for Urban Research by:

• Dr Carl Higgs — GOHSC Software Working Group co-lead
• Dr Melanie Lowe — GOHSC Co-Director

With support from the RMIT Advanced Cloud Ecosystem (RACE) Hub and the Global Observatory of Healthy and Sustainable Cities network.

The app has been designed as a complement to the open source Global Healthy and Sustainable City Indicators (GHSCI) software:

> Higgs C, Lowe M, Giles-Corti B, Boeing G, Delclòs-Alió X, Puig-Ribera A, Adlakha D, Liu S, Borello Vargas JC, Castillo-Riquelme M, Jafari A, Molina-García J, Heikinheimo V, Queralt A, Cerin E, Resendiz E, Singh D, Rodriguez S, Suel E, Domínguez-Mallafré M, Ye Y, Alderton A. Global Healthy and Sustainable City Indicators: Collaborative development of an open science toolkit for calculating and reporting on urban indicators internationally. Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science. 2024;52(5):23998083241292102. https://doi.org/10.1177/23998083241292102.

The policy review checklist was developed by Dr Melanie Lowe and Deepti Adlakha as part of the Lancet Global Health Series on Urban Design, Transport and Health (2022).

> Lowe M, Adlakha D, Sallis JF, Salvo D, Cerin E, Moudon AV, Higgs C, Hinckson E, Arundel J, Boeing G, Liu S, Mansour P, Gebel K, Puig-Ribera A, Mishra PB, Bozovic T, Carson J, Dygrýn J, Florindo AA, Ho TP, Hook H, Hunter RF, Lai P-C, Molina-García J, Nitvimol K, Oyeyemi AL, Ramos CDG, Resendiz E, Troelsen J, Witlox F, Giles-Corti B. City planning policies to support health and sustainability: an international comparison of policy indicators for 25 cities. The Lancet Global Health. 2022;10(6):e882-e894. en. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2214-109X(22)00069-9.

The tool supports a parallel research project — PolicyBridge — led by Dr Natalia Cadavid Aguilar and Dr Eugen Resendiz-Bontrud at the Center for the Future of Cities, Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico, exploring the use of large language models to assist in policy review for diverse global contexts.

Deploying to AWS

The application has been designed for deployment using AWS Amplify.