Building a Data Platform for Cross-Country Urban Health Studies: the SALURBAL Study

Abstract

Studies examining urban health and the environment must ensure comparability of measures across cities and countries. We describe a data platform and process that integrates health outcomes together with physical and social environment data to examine multilevel aspects of health across cities in 11 Latin American countries. We used two complementary sources to identify cities with ≥ 100,000 inhabitants as of 2010 in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, and Peru. We defined cities in three ways: administratively, quantitatively from satellite imagery, and based on country-defined metropolitan areas. In addition to “cities,” we identified sub-city units and smaller neighborhoods within them using census hierarchies. Selected physical environment (e.g., urban form, air pollution and transport) and social environment (e.g., income, education, safety) data were compiled for cities, sub-city units, and neighborhoods whenever possible using a range of sources. Harmonized mortality and health survey data were linked to city and sub-city units. Finer georeferencing is underway. We identified 371 cities and 1436 sub-city units in the 11 countries. The median city population was 234,553 inhabitants (IQR 141,942; 500,398). The systematic organization of cities, the initial task of this platform, was accomplished and further ongoing developments include the harmonization of mortality and survey measures using available sources for between country comparisons. A range of physical and social environment indicators can be created using available data. The flexible multilevel data structure accommodates heterogeneity in the data available and allows for varied multilevel research questions related to the associations of physical and social environment variables with variability in health outcomes within and across cities. The creation of such data platforms holds great promise to support researching with greater granularity the field of urban health in Latin America as well as serving as a resource for the evaluation of policies oriented to improve the health and environmental sustainability of cities.

Assessing Google Street View Image Availability in Latin American Cities

“…The SALURBAL data platform has been described in detail elsewhere [13]. Briefly, all cities with population ≥ 100,000 in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panamá, and Perú were identified.…”

“…This study seeks to better understand these issues of image availability and update frequency in the context of Latin American cities. The SALURBAL (Salud Urbana en America Latina) project has consolidated demographic and economic data from cities across Central and South America [13]. We used these data and the Google Street View Application Programming Interface (API) to describe variation in image availability, image age, and variance of image age across 371 Latin American cities, and to quantify associations between these variables with measures of socioeconomic conditions.…”

Adolescent Tobacco Exposure in 31 Latin American Cities before and after the Framework Convention for Tobacco Control

“…Between 2000 and 2015, 35 countries in Latin America participated in at least one GYTS survey. The current study is embedded in a project that aims to assess health in cities [ 18 ], consequently, we selected countries where cities could be identified in the dataset. Further, our aim was to analyze changes in survey responses in cities from the pre- (2000–2005) to a post-FCTC (2006 onward) period.…”

Urban health and health equity in Latin American cities: what COVID-19 is teaching us

“…Access to information and the ability to act on that information are also socially patterned. Selected features of Latin American cities that may affect the impact of the pandemic are shown in Table 1 (Quistberg et al 2019).…”

“…Selected characteristics (median, 25 th -75 th percentile) of 371 Latin American cities in the SALURBAL Study(Quistberg et al 2019).…”