Introduction
The COVID-19 pandemic has foregrounded the significance of collaboration between health and urban-focused government sectors for understanding and addressing health inequities in cities. Using the context of urban informal settlements in the Western Cape Province of South Africa as an example, this brief highlights the need to improve partnerships between health and urban local government sectors for the development of sustainable and healthy cities.
Specifically, this brief seeks to inform cities in low- and middle- income countries of potential barriers and enablers for the integration of urban health considerations into urban and built environment-relevant policies.
This research is part of the PEAK Urban Programme.
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More about the PEAK Urban programme.
PEAK Urban aims to aid decision-making on urban futures by:
1. Generating new research grounded in the logic of urban complexity;
2. Fostering the next generation of leaders that draw on different perspectives and backgrounds to address the greatest urban challenges of the 21st century;
3. Growing the capacity of cities to understand and plan their own futures.
In PEAK Urban, cities are recognised as complex, evolving systems that are characterised by their propensity for innovation and change. Big data and mathematical models will be combined with insights from the social sciences and humanities to analyse three key arenas of metropolitan intervention: city morphologies (built forms and infrastructures) and resilience; city flux (mobility and dynamics) and technological change; as well as health and wellbeing.