Interdisciplinary: ICUH draws participants from public health, medicine, urban planning, architecture, environmental science, epidemiology, engineering, economics, social sciences, community organizing, and law. The convergence of these disciplines in a shared forum is where the most consequential urban health insights emerge.

Cross-sector: Unlike academic conferences, ICUH is specifically designed to attract and engage government officials, private sector organizations, civil society advocates, and community practitioners alongside researchers — because sustainable urban health improvement requires all of these actors to be in dialogue.

Global: Hosted in a different world region each year, ICUH ensures that global urban health expertise is brought to bear on local contexts, and that local innovations are elevated to the global stage. Each host city contributes its own urban health challenges and innovations as living case studies for the conference.

Explicitly focused on translation and partnership: ICUH programming is structured not only for the presentation of research, but for dialogue between researchers and the practitioners, policymakers, and community members who can work together to apply and act on it. This translation function is ICUH's most consequential contribution.