# The Health Consequences of Urban Scaling

> **NIH NIH DP5** · DREXEL UNIVERSITY · 2021 · $391,250

## Abstract

Summary
The main goal of this project is to enhance the understanding of the processes and dynamics
linking urban growth to population health in order to identify promising policies and interventions
to promote health in cities all over the world. By 2030, around 60% of the world's population is
expected to live in urban areas. With the increase in chronic diseases and the re-emergence of
infectious diseases in urban cores in the developing world, there is an urgent need to
understand the health consequences of this urban growth and how it could be managed to
promote population health. Cities are complex systems where the density of social interactions
generates emergent phenomena, including the scaling properties of urban features. Previous
research in the complex systems literature has shown how social outputs such as wealth, crime
and innovation scale super-linearly (grow more than expected with city size), meaning that their
per capita rate is larger in larger cities due to increased amount of social contacts because of
network effects. On the other hand, physical infrastructure such as the length of the road
network or the number of gas stations scale sub-linearly (grow less than expected) due to
increased efficiency thanks to economies of scale. This proposal aims to: (1) study the scaling
properties of nine health outcomes in a heterogeneous sample of 718 cities in the US and 10
Latin American countries; (2) investigate the underlying correlates of the scaling properties of
these health outcomes; and (3) develop a system dynamics model to understand the
mechanisms behind the scaling properties of health outcomes, to generate hypotheses for
future studies. Data for Latin America in Aims 1 and 2 will be obtained from the SALURBAL
study, a collaboration of 15 institutions in 10 Latin American countries (Mexico, Guatemala, El
Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Colombia, Peru, Chile, Brazil and Argentina), led by Drexel
University. US data for Aim 1 will be obtained from the NCHS, while US Aim 2 data will be
obtained from the RECVD study (1R01AG049970). Aim 3 will use data and parameters from
Aims 1 and 2. Given the rapid rate of urbanization globally, our results will have broad
implications for understanding of the drivers of urban health worldwide and for urban policies to
promote population health. This study will help the investigator to jumpstart a career in complex
systems epidemiology and urban health, leveraging and deepening his training in both fields
and allowing the investigator to achieve research independence in one of the most promising
interdisciplinary collaborative environments in the field of urban health.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10247542
- **Project number:** 5DP5OD026429-04
- **Recipient organization:** DREXEL UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Usama Bilal
- **Activity code:** DP5 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $391,250
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2018-09-07 → 2023-08-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10247542

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10247542, The Health Consequences of Urban Scaling (5DP5OD026429-04). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-22 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10247542. Licensed CC0.

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