Promoting and Sustaining Urban Health: Challenges and Responses

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue addresses global concerns about our habitat and our health in an urbanizing world of constant change. Cities and urban development are complex, dynamic and systemic phenomena, the positive and negative consequences of which are addressed in the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The ways in which components of urban ecosystems influence health are a shared concern of researchers and practitioners in a variety of disciplines and professions within and beyond the health sciences and medical fields. Narrow cause/effect analyses that ignore multiple variables of urban environments are unlikely to achieve sustainable improvements for population health.

Notably, conventional sector-based contributions about the behavioural, environmental, economic, and social impacts of urban projects and policies should be extended to consider impacts on community health and well-being. Ecological public health, One health and planetary health can serve as overarching frameworks for research and practice that promotes and sustains health in a world of rapid urbanization and unpredictable change. Behavioural, environmental, economic, political and social variables must be interpreted in the context of global, regional and local socio-ecological systems; both individual and community health depend on the sustained functioning of these interrelated systems. This global, integrated framework is pertinent to the implementation of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 targets. It can facilitate improvements in the health of urban populations while enabling other sustainability goals and targets. This Special Issue underscores that the interrelations between SDG 3 “Good Health and Well-being” and SDG 11 “Sustainable Cities and Communities” should be clearly identified and then synergies between them should be valued by collective action. The ongoing implementation of the SDG framework, in tandem with the New Urban Agenda, will require and benefit from transdisciplinary collaboration between researchers, professionals, politicians, and citizens that coproduce innovative urban research and project implementation about food, housing, transport and other topics in cities North and South of the Equator.

For this Special Issue, original research articles and innovative project results related to the ongoing implementation of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and particularly the interconnections between SDG3 and SDG11, are welcome. Subjects may include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Active living for health promotion.
• Co-benefits of sustainable housing, building and land-use planning.
• Health promotion in communities, cities and mega-urban regions.
• Implementing the New Urban Agenda.
• Integrating health promotion into urban policies and planning.
• Interdisciplinary and inter-sector collaboration in urban planning.
• Mobility, transport and population health.
• Nature-based project benefits for health and well-being.
• Public policies for promoting and sustaining urban health.
• Reducing inequity and health inequalities in cities.
• Responsible behaviours of individuals and groups for planetary health.
• Implementing SDG 3 and SDG11.
• The residential context of health.
• Transdisciplinary urban projects.
• Urban agriculture and local food systems.
• Urban governance for health and well-being.
• Urban redevelopment projects for health and sustainability.
• World Health Organization (WHO) Healthy Cities projects.

If you are interested in contributing to this global publication about progress in implementing healthy and sustainable urban development, your contribution can be submitted for peer review until 1 December 2022.

Prof. Dr. Roderick J. Lawrence
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.