Chinmoy Sarkar and Chris Webster recently won the Excellence in Spatial Planning Research award (academic category), for their work using sDNA to add urban morphometric data to the UK Biobank medical database.

The Awards were presented by Trudi Elliott, Chief Executive of the RTPI, who said: “I congratulate all the winners on their outstanding achievements and also to the commended researchers. These Awards highlight the contribution of academics, teachers, learners and employers into greater understanding of the creation of high quality places.”

The UK Biobank Urban Morphometric Platform is a high resolution database of more than 750 spatial urban morphological metrics for the 500,000 Britons in the Biobank Prospective cohort.  The platform is being developed as a nationwide resource for evidence-based healthy city planning and other public health interventions.

The judges felt that this was an important study because it provides a robust evidence base for future initiatives that try to support built environment interventions that could have positive public health outcomes. This is a key ambition of planning, yet the basis for decision making is often weak. This study makes a major contribution to the field.

UK Biobank Built Environment Morphometrics for Wales: https://biobank.ctsu.ox.ac.uk/crystal/docs/ard-1195_UKBBuiltEnvWales.pdf

UK Biobank Built Environment Morphometrics for UK: http://biobank.ctsu.ox.ac.uk/crystal/label.cgi?id=100115