Measuring health and human development in cities and neighborhoods in the United States

Human development is a complex process involving interactions between individuals and their socioeconomic, biological, and physical environments. It has been studied using two frameworks: the “Capabilities Approach,” implemented at the national scale, and the “Neighborhood Effects Approach,” implemented at the community scale. However, no existing framework conceptualizes and measures human development across geographic scales. Here, we unite the two approaches by localizing the Human Development Index (HDI), and demonstrate a methodology for scalable implementation of this index for comparative analysis. We analyzed patterns of development in the United States, characterizing over 70,000 communities. We found that, on average, larger cities have higher HDI (higher standard of living) but exhibit greater disparities between communities, and that increases in community HDI are associated with the simultaneous reduction of a diverse set of negative neighborhood effects. Our framework produces an interdisciplinary synthesis of theory and practice for sustainable, equitable urban health and development.