Cities & Health

Cities & Health is a peer-reviewed journal published by Routledge, the Taylor & Francis social science and humanities imprint, carrying research and practice accounts on how urban environments shape human health.

It appeared in 2017 and works across public health, urban planning and design, transport, housing and environmental science, with a stated preference for evidence that city governments can act on.

Its 2025 Journal Impact Factor is 1.9, which places it in the third quartile of PUBLIC, ENVIRONMENTAL & OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH at rank 260 of 443 under Emerging Sources Citation Index coverage.

Scope

• The remit is the two-way traffic between city form and health, covering how streets, buildings, parks and services shape physical and mental wellbeing and how health evidence can steer urban decisions.
• Contributors come from public health, planning, architecture, landscape, transport engineering, ecology, sociology and economics, and the journal asks each of them to write for readers outside their own field.
• Healthy plan-making receives steady attention, including how health objectives enter spatial plans, zoning rules, masterplans and development appraisal, and what happens when those objectives meet budget pressure.
• Walkability and active travel form a large part of the published work, from street-level design and crossing provision to cycling networks, school travel and the measurement of everyday physical activity.
• Green and blue space is treated as public health infrastructure rather than decoration, with studies of parks, street trees, pocket gardens, rivers and coasts linking nature contact to stress, attention and heat exposure.
• Housing sits at the centre of the equity agenda, covering affordability, overcrowding, damp and cold, insecure tenure, homelessness and the health effects of neighbourhood disinvestment.
• Climate work spans heat islands and summer mortality, flooding and displacement, and the health co-benefits of shade, ventilation, active transport and low-carbon retrofit, with adaptation planning a recurring theme.
• Transport papers examine traffic exposure, tailpipe and brake emissions, aircraft and road noise, road danger and the redistribution of risk when streets are reallocated to walking, cycling or bus priority.
• Community voice appears through participatory mapping, resident panels, citizen science and co-design workshops, and authors are encouraged to report who was in the room and who was not.
• Health impact assessment, quantitative risk assessment and scenario modelling are published alongside qualitative appraisal, and the journal cares whether such tools actually changed a decision.
• Governance pieces look at how health departments, planning authorities, developers and community organisations negotiate, and at the budgets, statutory duties and accountability chains that decide whether a commitment survives.
• The pandemic years brought density arguments, temporary street closures, park use, isolation among older residents and the uneven geography of infection into the journal, and several of those threads have stayed.
• Alongside full research papers the journal carries practice reports from city teams, reflective essays, editorials and reviews, with shorter formats used to record what was tried and what changed on the ground.

History

• Volume one, number one appeared in 2017 under the Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis, with Abingdon in Oxfordshire given as the place of publication in the National Library of Medicine record.
• Its launch grew out of a long conversation between public health and built environment practitioners, and the founding editor came from the WHO Collaborating Centre for Healthy Urban Environments at UWE Bristol.
• Early output was thin, with two numbers in volume one and the same pattern in volume two, and combined issues began to appear in the years that followed.
• The National Library of Medicine still lists the journal as twice yearly, a frequency that described the launch years rather than the present schedule of six numbers in each volume.
• Growth came with volume six, the first to run to six numbers, while a supplement inside volume five shows that externally funded collections were already part of the programme.
• Ten volumes have appeared since 2017, so volume one belongs to 2017, volume nine to 2025 and volume ten to 2026, which makes the volume number a rough guide to age.
• Coverage sits in the Emerging Sources Citation Index rather than the Science Citation Index Expanded, and the title gained a Journal Impact Factor in 2023, when Clarivate extended the measure to ESCI journals.
• PubMed carries selected citations only, the wording the National Library of Medicine uses for a title whose content reaches beyond the biomedical core into planning, housing and social policy.
• The 2025 record shows 1.9 for the impact factor, a Journal Citation Indicator of 0.58, 1137 citations, a cited half life of 3.3 years and roughly 151 articles in the year.
• Two JCR categories hold the title at once, environmental and occupational health at 260 of 443 and urban studies at 51 of 86, matching the two readerships the journal set out to join.
• Access is by subscription with an open access option, and the 2025 gold share of about 27 percent suggests that most authors still publish behind the paywall.
• There has been no renaming, no merger and no change of owner since launch, and the ampersand in the title has stayed in place through every volume.
• Crossref now holds about 900 DOI records for the title, against a few dozen in the first two years, which traces the shift from a small twice yearly magazine to a steady rolling stream.

Editors

• Marcus Grant has held the editor in chief post since 2015, two years before the first issue appeared, and he remains the public face of the title at conferences and in editorials.
• His training is in landscape architecture and environmental consultancy, followed by research posts at the WHO Collaborating Centre and a spell inside a primary care trust in Bristol.
• That background explains the journal's habit of asking what a design decision did to a population, and of treating a local authority officer as a legitimate author rather than a source.
• A chief editor works with associate editors who each take a share of the field, from housing and transport to climate and practice, so a small central office can cover a wide remit.
• The editorial board is international, drawing members from universities, city authorities and consultancy practice across several continents, and reviewers are chosen for the domain rather than the discipline alone.
• Manuscripts enter through the publisher's online system, pass an editorial screen for fit, then go to external referees, and the usual round ends with a decision letter and a request for revision.
• Referees are asked whether the city and health link is made explicit, whether the method suits the question, and whether a reader in local government could act on the findings.
• Taylor & Francis is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics, and the journal follows the publisher's policy on corrections, expressions of concern and retraction when findings are challenged.
• Themed collections have been part of the programme, usually organised by guest editors around a city, a health topic or a policy moment, and they sit alongside the ordinary run of submissions.
• Authors are asked to keep language plain enough for a planning committee, to state the implication for practice in the abstract and to name the decision the work could inform.
• The editorial line favours work that crosses the boundary between research and practice, which is why a city officer and an academic often appear as joint authors on the same paper.