What is your project title?

Health Net Gain: A Generative AI Approach to Predicting Healthy Settlements through the Integration of Blue-Green-Movement Networks.

Tell me about yourself:

I am an urban designer, researcher, visual artist and co-founder of an award-winning practice specialising in zero-carbon masterplanning. As co-author of EcoResponsive Environments, my work investigates the integration of landscape-led urbanism, artificial intelligence, and Blue-Green-Movement networks to support climate resilience, healthy settlements, and social equity.

Tell me about your project:

Settlement design can address complex dimensions of human health, driven by a combination of factors. Research establishes settlements as complex systems that are fundamentally shaped by the interactions amongst Blue, Green and Movement (BGM) networks. Emerging concepts like Health Net Gain (HNG) emphasise the urgent need for predictive health modelling, treating settlements as more than sum of its parts. Despite extensive knowledge and data on healthy settlement design, growing evidence identifies fragmented placemaking approaches, treating health as a collection of isolated factors. This research addresses the gap by exploring whether the spatial integration of BGM networks can be operationalised into measurable affordances for healthy placemaking and incorporated into a predictive modelling tool; if so, how? Using a mixed-method approach, it combines design science research and qualitative interviews to develop a GIS-based GenAI tool capable of predicting settlement health outcomes, informing a future HNG mandate in spatial planning and design.