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About the project

Partners

This project has been developed by the Glasgow Centre for Population Health (GCPH) with support from a range of partners, including Glasgow City Council, Glasgow's Community Planning Team, Community Safety Glasgow, Glasgow Life, the University of Glasgow, NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde and the International Futures Forum.

Background

The motivation for the work has come from a number of places. Glasgow’s City Strategy Action plan (2007) included a commitment to developing health and wellbeing indicators for the city. In 2009, Growing a Healthier Glasgow – the report of Glasgow’s Health Commission – made 20 recommendations for what needed to change for the city to have a healthier future. The creation of a set of health and wellbeing or ‘progress’ indicators is one way in which the effectiveness of the Health Commission’s recommendations can be monitored.

The Glasgow Centre for Population Health (GCPH) also has a strong track record in describing health and health-related factors in the city, through health profiles, several films – including Miniature Glasgow and Views of Health in Glasgow – and through ongoing research to understand how Glasgow compares to post-industrialised European regions and, within the UK specifically, to Liverpool and Manchester. 

A podcast summarising the project and how you can use the data from this website is now available.

Aims

The purpose of this website is to produce an accessible resource that informs a wide audience about the wellbeing of Glasgow’s population across a range of domains (e.g. health, poverty, education, environment), allows progress to be monitored, and encourages civic engagement in the cross-cutting issues that face the city. 

Our model and guiding principles

We have developed a 12-domain model to describe health and wellbeing in the city. This provides a basket of indicators rather than one index, reflecting a dynamic interlinked view of the city. 

In presenting indicators we attempt to: 

  • show trends
  • show inequality, or difference, within the city
  • (where possible) make comparisons to other comparator UK cities and to European cities


Children's indicators

We have also developed a set of children's indicators, covering six domains: health, wellbeing and development, poverty, safety, learning and population. For further information on the children's indicators click here.

Films

The films section of Understanding Glasgow includes films that describe attitudes to travel, that highlight views on health issues in the city and a series of films in which Glaswegians tell their stories in their own words. 

It also includes the Miniature Glasgow film, in which Glasgow is imagined as a community of 100 people in order to describe the city's demography, health and economic context. This approach has been extended to compare Glasgow to Gothenburg in a miniature cities film.

For more information go to the films section.

Using the data

This section was developed to show how the Understanding Glasgow website can be used in educational and policy settings. It provides:

  • guidance on how the site can be used as an academic resource
  • case studies of the Glasgow Game – a scenario planning game which can be played based around the information of Understanding Glasgow
  • links between Understanding Glasgow’s domains and themes identified by speakers who have presented at GCPH’s seminar series over the last decade

For more information go to Using the data.

Profiles

In June 2014, a new set of health and wellbeing profiles were published on the Understanding Glasgow website. There are 60 profiles in total, covering Glasgow as a whole, the three sub-sectors of Glasgow’s Community Health Partnerships and 56 neighbourhoods across the city. The indicators presented cover: population; cultural factors; environment and transport; socioeconomic factors; education; poverty; and, health. 

For more information go to the profile section.

Future developments

We continue to develop the Glasgow indicators, updating existing indicators and adding new ones in response to emergent issues. For example, in 2014, we added sections covering in-work poverty and food banks, both of which are current concerns. In 2024, we added sections on housing and the food system.

We are encouraging use of the indicators in Glasgow Game events.

The Glasgow indicators and this website continue to develop. Content will expand and evolve over time.