WRI Ross Center
for Sustainable Cities
Annual Report
Healthy Cities, Thriving Communities
September 2026
What does a healthy city look like? A child walking safely to school on a street designed with their perspective in mind. A commuter in Beijing hopping seamlessly from metro to shared bike, breathing cleaner air because 30 million people now have a smarter way to move. A resident in sweltering Atlanta stepping outside on a summer evening and noticing that the heat has let up a little.
Health is not abstract. It shows up in the texture of our everyday lives: the air we breathe, the streets we use, the shade we find, the water that runs from the tap into our rivers. This year, as more and more places experienced heat waves and extreme heat, we saw more cities treating health not as a side effect of good urban policy but as a core objective.
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