Demographic change and urban health: Towards a novel agenda for delivering sustainable and healthy cities for all

A recently published article by urban health researchers discusses the importance of linking demographic change and urban health in the strive for healthy cities. The article, Demographic change and urban health: Towards a novel agenda for delivering sustainable and healthy cities for all,” is published by F1000 Research and co-written by Dr. Amy Weimann, an urban health researcher at ACC.

In their discussion, Duminy et al propose the following three core arguments, with a view of informing arguments and advocacy for urban health while identifying research gaps and priorities:

  • First, urban health advocates should express a globalized perspective on demographic processes, encompassing age-structural shifts in addition to population growth and decrease, and acknowledging their uneven spatial distributions within and between urban settings in different contexts.
  • Second, advocates should recognize the dynamic and transformational effects that demographic forces will exert on economic and political systems in all urban settings. While demographic forces underpin the production of (intra)urban inequities in health, they also present opportunities to address those inequities.
  • Third, a demographic perspective may help to extend urban health thinking and intervention beyond a biomedical model of disease, highlighting the need for a multi-generational view of the changing societal bases for urban health, and enjoining significant advances in how interested parties collect, manage, analyse, and use demographic data.

The article further highlights crucial research and data areas that need more attention, such as the health impacts (linked to climate change) of urban growth increasingly concentrated in coastal areas. These suggested research topics can complement the set of global research priorities for urban health recently identified by the World Health Organization (WHO).