How Neighborhoods Influence Health: Lessons to be learned from the application of political ecology

AimThis paper articulates how political ecology can be a useful tool for asking fundamental questions and applying relevant methods to investigate structures that impact relationship between neighborhood and health. Through a narrative analysis, we identify how political ecology can develop our future agendas for neighborhood-health research as it relates to social, political, environmental, and economic structures. Political ecology makes clear the connection between political economy and neighborhood by highlighting the historical and structural processes that produce and maintain social inequality, which affect health and well-being. These concepts encourage researchers to examine how people construct neighborhood and health in different ways that, in turn, can influence different health outcomes and, thus, efforts to address solutions

Urban ecological futures: Five eco-community strategies for more sustainable and equitable cities

Cities are critical sites for understanding, and potentially ameliorating, the effects of global ecological change, the climate emergency, and natural resource depletion. Contemporary cities are socio-materially connected through global markets, trade and transportation, placing ever-increasing demands on the natural environment and generating dangerous pollutants and emissions. Current approaches to address these environmental crises are dominated by neoliberal forms of ‘green’ urban development, carbon accounting, and techno-economic solutions, which extend corporate control over cities and tend to entrench inequality. A more strategic approach for enabling ecologically sustainable and equitable urban futures is urgently needed. We present five strategies for urban ecological futures in the Global North, derived from qualitative and ethnographic empirical research with international eco-communities, which open up discussions about how to tackle this challenge by acknowledging the role and potential of: (1) non-extractive community economies; (2)democratic processes of cooperative action; (3) social approaches to resource management; (4) participatory collaborative governance; and (5) urban heterogeneity and social justice. We explore the relational, contested and contextual processes through which these approaches could become embedded in urban policy and planning, thereby offering the strategic capacity required to move towards truly sustainable cities