Professor Iain Buchan, W.H. Duncan Professor of Public Health Systems at the University of Liverpool, has outlined how Liverpool City Region could shape AI to improve people’s lives, livelihoods and life chances.
Building on his talk, Magnificent Humanity: Civic AI in Dr Duncan’s City, delivered at Liverpool’s Metropolitan Cathedral on 10 July, Professor Buchan draws on lessons from Liverpool’s pioneering public health history to show how a civic path might lead to more human-centred AI.
Drawing on the legacy of Dr William Henry Duncan, Liverpool’s first Medical Officer of Health, Professor Buchan explained that the city has faced similarly profound technological and social change before – and has prevailed through civic innovation.
In the 1840s, Duncan used data about disease, death and squalid housing to expose the severe inequalities affecting Liverpool’s rapidly growing population in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. He teamed up with engineer James Newlands and civic regulator Thomas Fresh to drive a major public health programme, including the clearance of insanitary housing and the construction of hundreds of miles of sewers. This was the world’s first civic public health service and was notably data-driven.
This same civic method – gathering evidence close to the people affected, governing shared infrastructure through accountable institutions and translating that evidence into public good – offers a model for the era of data and AI.
At the heart of this approach is the principle that “data and AI should work for people, not the other way round”, with innovation developed with communities rather than simply applied to them.
This thinking is already reflected in work across Liverpool City Region. The Civic Data Cooperative, funded by Liverpool City Region Combined Authority and hosted at the University of Liverpool, was created to treat data as a civic asset, while the Civic Health Innovation Labs bring together the University, NHS, local government and industry around shared challenges.
In 2025, residents from all six Liverpool City Region boroughs also helped develop a Community Charter on Data and AI, setting out principles for trustworthy innovation. Its first principle is that data and AI must benefit the community, with human dignity at its core.
In his talk, Professor Buchan suggested that this civic approach provides a foundation for Liverpool City Region to apply Civic AI to complex challenges spanning health, work, public services and inequality. Ultimately, he argued, one of the simplest tests of progress should be: do inequalities narrow?
He has expanded on the themes of his talk in an article published by Liverpool City Region Combined Authority, From public health pioneer to civic AI: Liverpool City Region’s next global opportunity, which explores how the region could build AI capability with communities and ensure its benefits are shared more widely.
Read Professor Iain Buchan’s essay on Dr Duncan’s civic method for the age of AI.
The University of Liverpool’s AI for Life frontier brings together expertise from across disciplines to advance AI technologies and their applications. Our progressive civic and policy approaches to developing AI for Life are grounded in citizen and community participation, with the aim of improving health and social care, closing educational gaps and promoting economic growth.