City Know-hows
What if urban health went beyond human wellness? Through our ‘more-than-One Health’ conceptualization, we explored urban wild spaces as places where the health and flourishing of humans, animals, and ecosystems intertwine. This approach provides new insights into designing cities that are not just green, wild, but interconnected as restorative habitats for human and non-human health.
Share
Target audience
Urban planners, landscape architects, social scientists, public and global health researchers, policy-makers, stakeholders and citizens interested in explore diverse forms of nature in cities.
The problem
Global health challenges require a holistic approach that addresses the complex interactions between human, environmental, and biodiversity health. This is especially important in urban areas, where rapid urbanisation results in environmental degradation, biodiversity loss, and public health concerns. These issues raise critical questions: How can we create healthy urban environments that prioritise the well-being of both humans, biodiversity and urban ecosystems? Moreover, how can we better integrate considerations of human and non-human health in often overlooked urban ecosystems such as Urban Wild spaces?
What we did and why
We explored the health value of Urban Wild Spaces (UWS) -pockets of land where nature thrives with minimal human intervention and management- from an interdisciplinary perspective that integrates insights from the One Health framework and more-than-human approaches. Our more-than-One-Health conceptualization allowed us to delve into human-nature-health relationships in diverse UWS global contexts. We examined case studies in Santiago de Chile (vacant lands), Copenhagen (post-industrial landscapes), Edmonton (peri-urban forests), Bogotá (degraded peri-urban areas), and Singapore (urban wildness).
Our study’s contribution
Our study proposes novel ways of conceiving health in urban wildness by:
• Conceptualising a more-than-One-Health perspective to explore the complex entanglements between human and non-human well-being in urban contexts.
• Exploring urban wild spaces from a restorative perspective that support human and non-human health by facilitating therapeutic experiences, promoting local knowledge exchange, enhancing spaces for biodiversity and fostering contact with nature.
• Presenting opportunities to expand One Health framework through an interdisciplinary and collaborative approach that incorporates social sciences to address health challenges in urban global contexts.
Impacts for city policy and practice
Our research promotes integrating and managing Urban Wild Spaces (UWS) to prioritise urban wildness, multisensory experiences, and multispecies flourishing in urban policies.
UWS can serve as living labs where participatory restoration revitalises degraded landscapes, enhancing ecological functionality, community bonds, and nature connectedness.
This approach encourages innovative and participatory ways of governance and stewardship, and challenges planners to consider what a healthy urban environment means and for whom, fostering more inclusive policies that promote green spaces for people and biodiversity health.
Further information:
NovelEco research group studies societal attitudes to novel ecosystems (also described in the literature as urban wild spaces): NovelEco is a participatory science project that will measure, for the first time, societal attitudes towards urban wild spaces and species (or novel ecosystems) by working with citizens to study them and generate data on these unusual and perhaps overlooked urban ecosystems. Link.
From this website, we identified two case studies that caught our attention and inspired our selection of case studies.
Contemplating Los Cerros in Bogotá from the nature reserve El Umbral Cultural Horizontes: A therapeutic landscape experience
Wild nature in sustainable cities: Reflections towards multispecies ethnography in Nordhavnstippen, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Further information
Full research article:
[OPEN ACCESS] Let it grow wild! A more-than-One-Health perspective for wild spaces in cities by Natalia Rodriguez-Castañeda, Melissa Pineda-Pinto, Natalie M. Gulsrud, Megan Lynn Maurer and Marcus Collier
Related posts
Across many cities, residents of informal settlements lack safe, nearby green space. Using Nakuru (Kenya) as a testbed, we show how opening schoolyards to communities outside school hours can rapidly expand walkable access at minimal cost. With basic security and governance measures, this dual-use model can advance health equity and resilience.
This pioneering study on healthy and sustainable indicators for Jakarta is the first in Indonesia to use the Global Healthy and Sustainable City Indicators framework. As the most populous city in Indonesia and Southeast Asia, Jakarta’s inclusion provides valuable insights into its status compared to 25 international cities. We offer a critical perspective on existing spatial indicators, highlighting the need for precise definitions and careful interpretation within the city’s local context. Additionally, we propose new indicators to help policymakers and public health officials develop more adaptable measures for urban health and sustainability.
Exploring complete streets implementation in knowledge production territories, this research examines the potentials and limitations of using campuses as living labs, applying tactical urbanism. It identifies the opportunities for enhancing walkability and inclusivity and the challenges, e.g. regulatory issues and limited funding, stressing the role of governance and community engagement.
