I am very pleased to announce that the external website for the Centre for Sustainable, Healthy and Learning Cities and Neighbourhoods (SHLC) is officially live! You can visit and browse the website here. It is World Cities Day today (31 October) today, so a highly appropriate time for this release.

It was a great pleasure on behalf of PASCAL to speak at a conference focusing on the theme of ‘Learning cities for a creative economy and sustainable development’ held in the City of Vitebsk, the first officially designated Learning City in Belarus.

The University of Bristol has become the first UK university to launch a ‘Science of Happiness’ course, designed to teach students a set of science-based strategies for living a more fulfilling life.

Starting today, on World Mental Health Day [10 October], the course draws on the latest results in psychology and neuroscience to get to the root of what happiness is and how to achieve it, as well as teaching tangible practices which students can apply in their everyday lives.

#DATAFORCITIES  is a bi-weekly publication of the World Council of City Data (WCCD) that highlights a data point from each of the WCCD Cities – and, more importantly, shows how each city is harnessing standardized data to build the sustainable, prosperous, smart, resilient and inclusive cities of tomorrow.