One Health(y) Cities

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ABSTRACT

Cities find themselves at the interface of many scales of engagement, activity, policy making and intervention when it comes to dealing with the causes, treatment, and recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. These range from the microbiological to the planetary, and from the social scientific anthropological and social community patterns to hard science and clinical healthcare delivery. To make sense of this complexity we argue that cities ought to adopt the One Health paradigm, especially as One Health is purportedly a system of interconnected and coordinated zoonosis driven infectious disease approaches. The article demonstrates that an urban view of this biosecurity perspective is necessary, and argues One Healthy Cities are central to pandemic preparedness and recovery; are instrumental in confronting equity challenges.

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© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

KEYWORDS:

• One Health
• governance
• pandemic
• politics
• SDGs

Acknowledgement

Although I appear to be the sole author of this piece it is the result of inspirations, feedback, and actual narrative from Melanie Rock (University of Calgary, O’Brien Institute for Public Health) and Monika Kosinska (Regional Focal Point for Healthy Cities, WHO Regional Office for Europe). They will recognise their insights on One Health and More-Than-Human Health (Melanie) and Healthy Cities and SDGs (Monika). I am indebted to both.

Disclosure statement

Authors have no conflict of interest

Notes

1. WHO 2020. WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Address to the 73rd World Health Assembly. 18 May 2020. WHO manifesto for a healthy and green COVID-19 recovery. Geneva: World Health Organization. Available at https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/climate-change/who-manifesto-for-a-healthy-and-green-post-covid-recovery.pdf?sfvrsn=f32ecfa7_6

2. There is a true boom of such networks, for instance City Mayors Running the World’s Cities (www.citymayors.com), C40 Cities (c40.org), the Global network of Major Cities and Metropolitan Areas (www.metropolis.org), and more ‘locally’ there are networks of state capital cities (e.g., in Australia www.lordmayors.org). There even is a ‘network of networks’ in the Global Parliament of Mayors (https://globalparliamentofmayors.org/networks/).

3. The term ‘healthy cities’ can mean many things to many people and institutions (see de Leeuw et al. 2020). There is an ‘official’ WHO view but also health focused value driven urban health resilience efforts that adopt the term but not the ‘official’ codification. Healthy Cities (capitals) is the ‘official’ approach, healthy cities (lower case) any urban effort, in public or private sector, and community, that embraces a social movement perspective for healthier, more sustainable, equitable futures for all. Other terms such as ‘healthy urban planning’ or ‘health place-making’ may cover similar territory.

Additional information

Funding

EdL was supported by UNSW, Ingham Institute and South Western Sydney Local Health District.

Notes on contributors

Evelyne de Leeuw

Evelyne de Leeuw is a health promotion scholar, Healthy Cities afficionado, and health political science advocate. She operates at the interface of the research and practice of public health, urban planning and policy making at the Centre for Health Equity Training, Research and Evaluation CHETRE. Here, in South Western Sydney (New South Wales, Australia) she successfully straddles local government, academia, place based health promotion, community and institutional health politics, and the glocal need for better, fairer health. She also leads a multi-university and multi-health district collaboratory that aims to change Healthy Urban Environments.