CITY KNOW-HOW
Human health and planetary health are influenced by city lifestyles, city leadership, and city development. For both, worrying trends are leading to increasing concern and it is imperative that human health, health equity and environmental impacts all become core foci in urban policy.
This will require a transformation in cities and health policy, in innovation and in practice. Changing the ways we do things requires concerted action, the journal Cities & Health is dedicated to supporting the flow of knowledge, in all directions, to help make this happen. The journals mission is to foster communication between researchers, practitioners, policy-makers, communities, and decision-makers in cities.
In order to strengthen this community of interest, we want to include many and varied voices, including those from practitioners and researchers at all stages of their careers who are trying to support health and health equity in everyday urban lives. Please join in these conversations.
Marcus Grant
Editor-in-Chief
Colin Fudge
Guest Editor
This special issue of Cities & Health titled ’Transforming cities and health: policy, innovation and practice‘ comprises a series of articles shedding light, from a wide range of perspectives, on how to achieve transformative change. There is much in this issue for policy makers and practitioners to take away, with its mixture of city reportage, reflection and case studies.
As we hurtle into the unprecedented challenges and uncertainties brought about by the climate breakdown, ecological extinctions, global health risk and health inequity, all arguably influenced or caused by the societal, political and economic systems that have been created; the leading editorial ‘Transforming cities and health: policy, action and meaning’ by two of the issue editors, Colin Fudge and Marcus Grant together with Holger Wallbaum, looks at that perennial gap between policy and action; between what we say and what we do. It examines this as a long running phenomena and, using two illustrative case studies around transformation, draws together some of the issues we need to face if we are to really meet todays challenges for cities and health head on.
Following the leading editorial, this issue has two ‘city shorts’. These give accounts of innovative action in cities, in this case both reports are from London. Ben Plowden gives an account of a transport initiative with public health outcomes ’Creating Healthy Streets for sustainable cities’. With a starting point that London’s physical inactivity crisis is having a significant negative impact on the population’s health, the Mayor’s has launched a £2.3bn ‘Healthy Streets’ programme. This is a systemic, evidence-based approach to creating streets and transport networks that support active travel. This is an example of transectoral collaboration, integrating policy, planning and delivery across health, transport, spatial planning and environment. Also acknowledging the key role that transport plays in shaping the future of a city, Rikesh Shah ‘Innovating in a Global City‘ describes how Transport for London, has acted as a hub for innovation and spin-out technologies. His article provides case studies of innovations that tame problems with dockless bikeshare and how to use IT partnerships to encouraging more walking. It shows how a city transport authority needs to be at the forefront of technological development and curating innovation.
The next section of the issue sees five reflective articles cutting across academia and practice. ‘In greensight: Imagining healthier futures in urban cores-the case of Turku’ is an article from Finland by Ana Jones and Marcus Wilenius. Their paper provides unique insight into new perspectives of cross-disciplinary methods combining futures studies and urban planning to help imagine healthier futures for compact urban cores. This has an empirical basis lying in research-based collaboration with the City of Turku, the former capital of Finland. The goal was the creation of an ambitious but realistic vision and strategic plan focused on liveability and wellbeing and addressing challenges posed by spatial fragmentation and lack of cohesion. Through the process, it was concluded that to create a positive transition, planning requires the adoption of what they call a ‘greensight’ perspective as a point of departure. The lessons learned conclude with some important points the authors want to share with other cities. Next is Trevor Hancock, Pooran Desai & Rebecca Patrick’s reflection ‘Tools for creating a future of healthy One Planet cities in the Anthropocene’. They suggest that with the impact of the Anthropocene becoming increasingly apparent, we all need to learn how to live within the constraints of this one small planet that is our home. Good foresight work is needed and is about helping people think more effectively and creatively about the future. They suggest that the ‘One Planet’ approach to creating healthier and more sustainable cities and communities is one way to get citizens, communities and municipalities to work towards co-creating such a future. This approach is developing in several ways in several places; here they present emerging work including in the UK, Canada and Australia.
Next you will find three shorter think pieces. Alina Oxendine raises questions about the political environment for leaders interested in improving public health. How can they be made conducive to engaging with policy experimentation and innovation? Her article ‘Inequality, Innovation and the Future of Cities: Navigating Political Challenges of Rising Distrust and Anxiety’ analyzes existing research on challenges due to rising distrust and status anxiety, fuelled by economic inequality, and including her own work on trust and public opinion with implications for local-level public health innovation and long-term city planning. Joana Correia and Ralph Horne and team from RMIT University in Melbourne/UN Global Compact: Cities Programme, publish their thoughts in ‘From Ballarat to Bangkok: How can cross-sectoral partnerships on the SDGs accelerate urban liveability?’ The paper situates urban liveability and action for it at the local level through the Sustainable Development Goals. It describes a City Partnerships project in Ballarat, Australia and a Bangkok liveability project. This practice paper documents and reflects on these two projects and their contribution to liveability and related public health outcomes. As a cross-case assessment it provides insights into the efficacy of the Sustainable Development Goals and the New Urban Agenda as common platforms for the wide range of interest groups required to progress urban liveability. The final think piece is from Kat Martindale, presenting a highly practitioner relevant point of view in ‘Industry driven innovation in healthy housing delivery: the case for Cross Laminated Timber’. The paper uses interviews with architects to discuss the benefits of Cross Laminated Timber homes have on the physical and psychological health of their occupants and barriers to its use. With the delivery of housing being a continuing issue of concern for academics, policymakers and built environment professionals, Cross Laminated Timber construction has attracted significant interest due to its environmental and health benefits, as well as reduced build times.
The final section of this special issue is devoted to four conceptual papers. Trevor Hancock and Clem Bezold title their paper ‘Thinking about the future of health and cities in the Anthropocene’. They want us to be aware that how we think about the future – including the future of cities and of health – is of great importance. As we enter the Anthropocene, we need to understand how environmental, social, political, cultural and technological forces may shape the future. A useful way to think about the future is in terms of alternative futures and optional scenarios, we must explore possible, plausible and preferable future conditions. They present the ‘Futures Cone’ as one way to visualise these alternatives. Based on an understanding of the driving forces, alternative future scenarios may include extrapolative or ‘business as usual’ scenarios; challenging scenarios that include various forms of collapse; and visionary or transformational scenarios that build equity and sustainability.
Robin Hambleton unpacks the roles and players in city leadership in his paper ‘Leading the healthy city: taking advantage of the power of place’. Creating healthy cities requires the exercise of bold city and community leadership. With cameos of inspirational civic leadership in three innovative cities, Malmö in Sweden, Portland in Oregon USA and Bristol in England, he illustrates possibilities and set out suggestions on how to advance the leadership capacity of communities and cities. He outlines pioneering new forms of progressive, collaborative governance, from inside and outside the state, that can bring about processes to co-create healthy, just and sustainable cities. Combining these concepts with what is possible, the focus is firmly on the role of local leadership.
Recognizing that health is an important element of city’s resilience to various types of risks and threats, Lina Martínez, Esteban Leon, Sozvin Salih, Anna Karaan publish an insightful paper titled ‘Strengthening Health Lens in Urban Resilience Frameworks’. Although rapid urbanization and climate change constitute growing threats to population health in cities, they discuss the multiple factors, including social, political, economic, that shape their capacity to withstand and recover from the effects of contemporary challenges in urban areas. By reviewing resilience-based urban planning approaches and policies, their paper identifies issues related to overlooking the multi-dimensionality of health issues in urban areas; to treating health impacts as merely a dividend of the implementation of such approaches rather than means and targets. Health needs to be the concern not only of the health sector, but of all sectors and in all urban policies.
Roderick Lawrence’s paper is a conceptual piece about planning and constructing built environments and infrastructure for healthy cities and communities founded on combinations of different types of knowledge and ways of knowing that include creative thinking. Titled ‘Collective and Creative Consortia Combining Knowledge, Ways of Knowing and Imagination’, it examines the different disciplinary skills and competences that should be interrelated, synthesized and applied creatively in complementary ways for concerted action between consortia of researchers, practitioners and representatives of civil society. It is illustrated by two large urban projects, the community-led Ringland Project for road traffic in Antwerp, Belgium, and the co-creation of a new housing cooperative in Zurich, Switzerland; both projects have direct and indirect impacts on health. Lawrence advocates mutual exchange between different types knowledge and ways of knowing by transdisciplinary contributions, concluding that creative and imaginative thinking are necessary to synthesize different types of knowledge and ways of knowing.
On behalf of the Editorial Board we would like to thank all of the authors, reviewers for this special issue, which has been long in development and then delayed near the end by the COVID-19 crisis. We also want to thank our special issues partners, UN-Habitat and UN Global Compact: Cities Programme. They have been instrumental in writing and soliciting articles and assisting the review process and we look forward to their help in disseminating the thoughts, and we hope wisdom, contained in this volume.
We look forward to our readers and authors continued support as we continue with both our regular generic issues and our programme of special issues. Please watch out for calls for contributions and feel free to contact the editors if you would like to suggest, or lead, a special issue.
UN Global Compact Cities Programme
In the UN Global Compact Cities Programme we are supporting towns and cities and the private sector to come together to find innovative solutions to expand and implement social responsibility and cope with the impacts of climate change.
We wanted to sponsor this special issue as it is focused on both the futures of cities and health and the large scale transformation that is now required across the globe. Having a range of people thinking and writing about innovations, practices and new policy formulations and processes on this critical topic is both helpful to us but more importantly will start a much wider conversation about the future and how we get there.
UN-Habitat
UN-Habitat joyfully accepted the invitation to sponsor this special issue of Cities & Health, due to the focus on the critical area of transformation of cities and health in the context of climate emergency and threatened biodiversity of the planet. For UN-Habitat as the United Nations Programme for Cities, working on urban resilience building and the future of cities across the world is fundamental. We are keen to support the thinking about urgent innovations in practice and policy, the politics of change and governance, and how health and urban futures should be integrated and mutually reinforcing. We hope that this collection will initiate a wider conversation and provide seeds for change and action.