About Making the Case for Urban Health: Defining Value and Relevance to Contemporary Challenges

With the continuing expansion of cities worldwide, human health and wellbeing depend more and more on urban dynamics and decisions. By standard measures, well over half of the global population lives in cities, and new efforts to account for varying definitions of urban in producing harmonized estimates place this figure even higher. Regardless of the specific measure applied, the number of urban dwellers continues to rise, and cities are destined to be the predominant human habitat in all regions for the foreseeable future.

Cities have always acted to safeguard health and wellbeing. Yet, as the expanding consequences of modern urbanization for health have become increasingly self-evident, interest in understanding impacts and designing solutions has burgeoned: in academic research, in practical interventions by a range of urban stakeholders, in governmental policy, and in global sustainable development. Together, these efforts demarcate the emergent field of urban health.

Broader than traditional public health, urban health embraces the many sectors, actors, and actions at multiple scales that influence the health and wellbeing of urban dwellers—as well as the productive functioning of the ecological systems that support them. Yet this breadth and complexity has made it challenging to define in ways that speak to the diverse stakeholders involved or that foster integrated, strategic action. The latter is increasingly recognized as critical—for example, the World Health Organization (WHO), recognizing the importance of urban phenomena across all its work, has elevated urban health to a cross-cutting thematic area in recent years.

In practice, cities—and countries and other subnational authorities—leave substantial unrealized opportunities on the table when it comes to urban health. Interventions are often reactive, isolated from other efforts, and limited to certain populations, outcomes, or sectors of interest. In part, this is because of the inherent complexity of urban areas, which makes it challenging to understand, anticipate, or react in a coordinated way to the intersecting processes that affect health. Siloed institutions that arise from logistical constraints and natural limitations on human capacities also play a role. Yet, another reason why the full potential of cities to transform health for the better remains dormant is that the case for strategic action on urban health and the ways in which it would further other societal goals have been incompletely articulated.

The time is thus ripe for a reconsideration and consolidation of the case for urban health. To address this need, the WHO Urban Health unit has commissioned a series of issue papers, gathered in this collection of F1000 Research. The collection comprises three distinct but related sections. The first will aim to clarify conceptual issues around urban health, including the relationships and dependencies among existing efforts in various domains. The second section will lay the groundwork for a more comprehensive assessment of the scale of urban health challenges and the potential gains from strategic action in epidemiological, economic, and equity terms. The third section will explore the relationships between urban health and other issues that drive contemporary policy and politics, providing entry points and effective arguments for urban health action.

Together, these issue papers will be a resource for urban health advocacy, equipping decision-makers and other stakeholders with practical insights, making a more convincing case for urban health action, and signaling to researchers where further work is needed to clarify the benefits of a strategic approach.

Submissions to this collection are by invitation only, therefore, the collection is unfortunately not open to wider submissions.

Any questions about this collection? Please get in contact directly with Sam Hall (sam.hall@f1000.com)