Transforming cities and health: policy, action, and meaning

ABSTRACT

This article sets the scene for the special issue of Cities & Health Journal on ‘Transforming cities and health: policy, innovation and practice.’ It focuses on systematic transformations to meet sustainability and climate goals whilst also placing health at the heart of policy change and action. Our intention is to raise broad issues drawing on multiple disciplines and provoke engagement with this area of underachievement. We ask:

• How do we achieve action and momentum in transformational change?

• What are the key components for future transformations in terms of governance, business models, time and sequencing, scaling, leadership and imagination?

• Are there limits and barriers to what can be achieved?

• Do these demands require a more radical and fundamental change and strategic direction?

In responding we note the policy-action gap and the failure to recognise the complexity in policy responses, the continuing growth of cities and the ongoing inability to address basic health needs, and we speculate about the changes that affect the context in which we work over the next decade. We highlight two case studies, where we are involved, that attempt to close the implementation gap and progress transformations. We then offer some further reflections in relation to research and practice in attempting to transform cities and health together to meet the Paris Agreement on climate change, the implementation of the UN SDGs and actions on biodiversity. In discussion we return to the current pandemic and what this tells us about this moment, future transformations and the possibilities and limits to action.

KEYWORDS:

• UN SDGs
• sustainable Development
• innovation
• transformation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Colin Fudge

Colin Fudge is Professor of Urban Futures and Design at Chalmers University, Sweden; Senior Adviser to the EU Climate KIC; Global Adviser for the UN Global Compact: Cities Program and for UN Habitat and is King Carl Gustav XVI, Royal Professor of Environmental Science, Sweden. Colin works on urban futures and design, sustainable development, urban health and urban design He is Emeritus Professor in RMIT, Australia and in Bristol, U.K. He has worked in universities at President and Vice-President levels in Europe and Australia and at Deputy Secretary and Director levels in government and cities in the UK and Australia. From 1993 to 2005, he was President of the EU Urban Environment Expert Group for the European Commission.

Marcus Grant

Marcus Grant is Editor-in-Chief of Cities & Health and former deputy director of the World Health Organisation’s Collaborating Centre for Healthy Cities. With a background in ecological systems and urbanism, he is a practitioner-scholar working in healthy urban planning, healthy place-making and planetary health. He is an expert advisor to the WHO and UN-Habitat, a contributor to “Health as the Pulse of the New Urban Agenda’ and author of the WHO/UN Sourcebook: Integrating health into urban and territorial planning (2020). Marcus is a Fellow of the Faculty of Public Health, a member of the Landscape Institute and is based in Bristol, England.

Holger Wallbaum

Holger Wallbaum is a professor in sustainable building at the Division of Building Technology, research group Sustainable Building, and in the Area of advance Building Futures. Holger works within sustainable building on concepts, tools and strategies to enhance the sustainability performance of construction materials, building products, buildings as well as entire cities. His main research interests are related to ecological and economic life cycle assessment of construction materials, buildings and infrastructures, sustainability assessment tools for buildings, social-cultural and climate adapted design concepts, the refurbishment of the building stock as well as dynamic building stock modelling and its visualization.