Urbanisation and Health Network

Description

The Urbanisation and Health Network, funded by the Social Sciences Research Centre, focuses on the burgeoning challenge of urban growth and its health implications. Countries in the Global South experience rapid, uncontrolled urbanisation, whereas the Global North contends with health and social inequalities in urban areas. Discerning the interplay between urbanisation and health, particularly how health and wellbeing can be bolstered in cities, presents a significant global challenge.

Urbanisation inherently demands a trans-disciplinary approach, eliciting collaborative synergistic outcomes. This includes understanding the impacts of urban environments on health, which requires interdisciplinary expertise from fields such as environmental science, chemistry, civil engineering, sociology, and public health. Effective interventions must address urbanisation in its entirety, as seen in the failed slum clearance strategies in South Africa, India, and Brazil.

The United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 11 underlines the need for sustainable cities, with 193 countries committed to achieving ten targets including housing, transport, environmental impact, and participatory planning and governance in urban areas.

The University of York, renowned for its multi-disciplinary collaboration, plays an essential role in fortifying evidence of how urbanisation impacts health and what methods improve urban health and wellbeing. The Network fosters ties among researchers from diverse disciplines and stimulates innovative approaches to understanding urbanisation's impacts on health and wellbeing. It primarily focuses on low and lower-middle-income countries and impoverished neighbourhoods in high-income countries.

The Network's objectives are to:

1. Promote understanding: Advance, share, and expand interdisciplinary methods to understand urbanisation's impacts.

2. Share knowledge: Identify and distribute new knowledge and available data sets on urbanisation's health effects to inform joint publications and future grant proposals.

3. Collaborate: Broaden collaborations with academics worldwide, including network affiliations in related topics, to reinforce York's work on urban health.

4. Support research: Assist early-career academics, postdoctoral and postgraduate researchers, and PhD researchers across departments and faculties at York, facilitating exposure to varied disciplinary approaches and fostering connections with leading thinkers on urbanisation's impacts.

The Network's members lead diverse projects from different disciplinary perspectives, exploring urbanisation and health through angles such as pollution's physical sciences and chemistry, social determinants of health inequities, urban governance, policy, health systems, and impacts on health risk factors and outcomes.

Offers funding

No, this infrastructure does not provide funding.

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University of York
York