European and international cities face major challenges resulting from global geopolitical, economical, climate and other changes. This intensifies inequalities in health, due to several factors such as living conditions, health-related behaviour, education, occupation and income. Urban areas are under huge pressure to enhance policies in order to become more sustainable and livable, as well as to provide environments and social fabric that support Public Health (PH) and Wellbeing (WB). The conventional approach to urban and revitalization planning is based mostly on profit criteria with routine methodologies, often lacking advanced integrated methods and concepts with emphasis on health, societal and environmental aspects (including Climate Change-CC). Moreover, local communities’ needs are neglected and hence cities often end up with solutions that are not embraced by local communities and citizens. To address these challenges, the HEART project aims to comprehensively address factors influencing PH&WB, provide evidence base (proven by clinical tests where appropriates) thus improve urban health and reduce health disparities through changes in individual behaviour of citizens, stimulated by different policies. This will include advanced Blue-Green (BG) based urban design, where PH, WB and environmental quality will be intrinsically built-in in all phases of planning and implementation, with strong involvement of local communities to allow them to embrace new solutions.

Geosystems (GSH) has a leading responsibility in the overall exploitation of the project, coordinating all efforts that aim to develop and apply exploitation strategies and plans to foster market introduction of the key innovations of the project within the wider European community of cities. Additionally, GSH is also leading the tasks related to the initial deployment of the tools developed by the project’s consortium as well as the activities that are linked to the acquisition and inventory of all required datasets. Finally, GSH provides assistance in various dissemination and standardization activities, as well as aids in the seamless integration of the various technical tools within the overall platform that is designed as part of the HEART project.

The HEART project has received funding from the [European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme] [Euratom Research and Training Programme 2014-2018], under Grant Agreement No 945105

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