This Fact Sheet offers evidence-informed principles to support health equity through interventions in the built environment. It is based on a scoping review titled Working with local governments to support health equity through the built environment, which examines 16 review articles and 37 Canadian empirical studies published on health equity and the built environment since 2010, and is supplemented with additional literature related to local government intervention options.
Much of the research cited here explores health equity through measures of socioeconomic deprivation—there is limited research on the specific built environment needs of priority populations such as older adults, low-income children, Indigenous populations, newcomers to Canada, people living with physical disabilities or chronic illness, and homeless populations. These population groups are known to be at greater risk for poor health, largely due to inequities in the distribution of the social determinants of health.
