Research and Metropolitan Health in Unequal Cities

Rio de Janeiro 22-24 Nov 2017

Key theme: urban health and wellbeing

Sub-themes: Public health, city life, re-thinking urban wellbeing

The full programme can be downloaded here. An edited volume of contributions, based on the presentations around the event, is forthcoming: for more information, please contact Andreza de Souza Santos at andreza.desouzasantos@compas.ox.ac.uk. 

Issues of urban health and wellbeing invoke concerns that are simultaneously both social and medical. Objective measures of wellbeing compete with perceptions and representations of the city environment as criminogenic, safe, healthy, polluted, remote or well-connected. Stigmatised neighbourhoods of the city considered unhealthy, violent, and remote generate a potentially self justifying domain of insecurity and inequality. Urban dwellers living in areas with high levels of crime are often considered potential criminals rather than potential victims. Perceptions of insecurity and inequality also further escalate discrimination according to gender, race, and age.

However, if city perceptions determine city experience, changing one could potentially influence the other. Could research and its results, despite their often intangible means, make urban life visible through a different lens, create concrete new urban experiences? In this workshop, we aim to highlight how urban research addresses the challenges of healthy, safe, and sustainable cities and affects urban experience. We will present projects in the context of the UK Economic and Social Research Council’s Urban Transformations programme and invite investigators to demonstrate how research findings and outputs have a capacity for change. We are also aware that the urban environment may filter and limit research interests, and investigators are also invited to engage with their own limits and challenges they face.

Participants include Laura Helena Silveira Guerra de Andrade (USP), Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos (University of Oxford), Ana Bazzan (UFRGS), Veruska Delfino, Gabriel Feltran (UFSCAR), Carolina Grillo (UFRJ), Paul Heritage (Queen Mary University of London), Daniel Hirata (UFF), Deljana Iossifova (University of Manchester), Michael Keith (University of Oxford), Miriam Krenzinger (UFRJ), Nick Manning (KCL), Cathy McIlwaine (KCL), Rosana Morgado (UFRJ), Denver Nixon (University of Oxford), Francisco Ortega (UERJ), Nikolas Rose (KCL), Warren Smith (University of Cape Town), Luiz Eduardo Soares, Isabela Souza da Silva (UFF) and Marcus Vinicius Faustini.