Clare Herrick

The New Urban Agenda: key opportunities and challenges for policy and practice

The UN-HABITAT III conference held in Quito in late 2016 enshrined the first Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) with an exclusively urban focus. SDG 11, as it became known, aims to make cities more inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable through a range of metrics, indicators, and evaluation systems. It also became part of a post-Quito ‘New Urban Agenda’ that is still taking shape. This paper raises questions around the potential for reductionism in this new agenda, and argues for the reflexive need to be aware of the types of urban space that are potentially sidelined by the new trends in global urban policy.

Designing the fit city: public health, active lives, and the (re)instrumentalization of urban space

The relationship between the built environment, physical activity, and well-being is currently attracting concerted government attention in the UK which has been formalized through new sets of urban planning and design guidelines. In light of this, the author argues that the domains of intersection between the physical environment and governmental health and social agendas need further exploration. Furthermore, she asserts that urban geographers are theoretically and empirically well placed to undertake valuable and much needed research agendas within these domains. To explore these assertions, the author first sets out the recent turn to physical activity as an explicit policy concern. She then critically interrogates two recent sets of design guidelines, Active Design (Sport England) and the 2008 NICE guidance within the context of current UK policy thinking, before exploring the problematic nature of the instrumental readings of space they present. It is argued that this instrumental rationale may sanction the neglect of the intrinsic value and importance of active lives themselves to urban spaces, which, it is asserted, can have marked impacts on well-being. An appreciation of this opens up new geographical research agendas with respect to the built form, public health, and governance.

To the West and East of Interstate-35: Obesity, Philanthropic Entrepreneurialism, and the Delineation of Risk in Austin, Texas

The author draws on a case study of Austin, Texas to argue that the emerging cannon of critical obesity studies should be situated in and interrogated with reference to empirical research undertaken in the urban spaces that enable or constrain healthy behavior. With federal, state and city-scale government departments calling for concerted obesity-prevention efforts, it is suggested that this enterprise has now rendered Austin a space of philanthropic entrepreneurialism. Drawing on stakeholder interviews with those charged with healthy-lifestyle promotion, the author contends that the citys bifurcation by Interstate-35 marks a clear real and imagined socioeconomic and racial divide. Moreover, this divide permits the delineation of East Austin as ‘at risk’ by virtue of its Hispanic population and the assumption that higher prevalent rates of obesity among Hispanic residents are an outcome of certain cultural norms. As a result, East Austin has been legitimized as a strategic place of intervention to help boost the citys image as a healthy, and therefore good, place to live. However, such interventions favor changing personal behavior and therefore neglect to address the environmental and structural factors which, it is asserted, often have far more immediate and profound effects on health.

The politics of non-communicable diseases in the global South

In this paper, we explore the emergence of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) as an object of political concern in and for countries of the global South. While epidemiologists and public health practitioners and scholars have long expressed concern with the changing global distribution of the burden of NCDs, it is only in more recent years that the aetiology, politics and consequences of these shifts have become an object of critical social scientific enquiry. These shifts mark the starting point for this special issue on ‘The Politics of NCDs in the Global South’ and act as the basis for new, critical interventions in how we understand NCDs. In this paper, we aim not only to introduce and contextualise the six contributions that form this special issue, but also to identify and explore three themes – problematisation, care and culture – that index the main areas of analytical and empirical concern that have motivated analyses of NCDs in the global South and are central to critical engagement with their political contours.

The Southern African Famine and Genetically Modified Food Aid: The Ramifications for the United States and European Union's Trade War

The 2002 southern African famine marked a new phase in the long-standing trade war between the United States and the European Union over genetically modified organisms. This work will explore how the delivery of genetically modified food aid to the region concretized the ontological disparities between the two trading blocs. In addition, I argue that genetically modified crops necessitate not only new development policy, but new ways of theorizing development itself in the light of globalized systems of food production.

Global Health, Geographical Contingency, and Contingent Geographies

Health geography has emerged from under the “shadow of the medical” to become one of the most vibrant of all the subdisciplines. Yet, this success has also meant that health research has become increasingly siloed within this subdisciplinary domain. As this article explores, this represents a potential lost opportunity with regard to the study of global health, which has instead come to be dominated by anthropology and political science. Chief among the formers concerns are exploring the gap between the programmatic intentions of global health and the unintended or unanticipated consequences of their deployment. This article asserts that recent work on contingency within geography offers significant conceptual potential for examining this gap. It therefore uses the example of alcohol taxation in Botswana, an emergent global health target and tool, to explore how geographical contingency and the emergent, contingent geographies that result might help counter the prevailing tendency for geography to be side-stepped within critical studies of global health. At the very least, then, this intervention aims to encourage reflection by geographers on how to make explicit the all-too-often implicit links between their research and global health debates located outside the discipline.

Why we need to think beyond the ‘industry’ in alcohol research and policy studies

The alcohol policy debate demands greater critical reflection on the complex and disaggregated nature of the alcohol industries in contrast to their frequent characterization as a coherent, monolithic and singular entity with a common goal. Such reflection is necessary in order to rethink the linked assumption that drinkers are vulnerable victims of the activities of industry and, in so doing, to start moving beyond the UKs current policy development impasse in creative and plausible ways.

Alcohol control and urban livelihoods in developing countries: can public health aspirations and development goals be reconciled?

This commentary explores how household economic necessity and the public health aspirations set out in the WHO’s global strategy to reduce the harmful use of alcohol might be reconciled in the context of alcohol control in developing countries. The ‘ambiguity’ of alcohol’s role in social and economic development is clear, but, as yet, little progress has been made on how best to integrate alcohol control within development policies in low- and middle-income countries. Without this holistic thinking, alcohol control efforts are likely to be thwarted by liquor’s allure as an accessible micro-enterprise opportunity. Similarly, developmental efforts will be undermined by the severity of alcohol-related harms that now disproportionately affect middle-income countries. Drawing on the example of South Africa, this short commentary explores the complexities of controlling the supply of alcohol when its sale represents a major livelihood strategy amid conditions of high unemployment and constrained access to formal employment markets. The policy preference for closing illegal bars or shebeens in South Africa does not address the ‘causes of the causes’ of why people drink, and therefore why its sale continues to be an attractive livelihood choice. It also does little to provide alternative leisure or employment opportunities, which ultimately threatens the longer term sustainability of policy. We need to better appreciate why selling alcohol is a seductive business opportunity and the potential consequences of this for realising public health aspirations.

Mapping university global health partnerships

www.thelancet.com/lancetgh Vol 4 October 2016 e694 institutions, between the UK and its former colonies, and between US institutions and Haiti are clear. The map also shows the substantial untouched regions that are in great health-care need and remain unpartnered (ie, north and central Africa and central Asia), as well as an absence of the kind of south– south coalitions so often advocated. Although the map is obviously an artifact of the sample universities, many of the top Asian universities tend to partner with US rather than LMIC institutions. We are aware that recent partnerships—or those not openly advertised online—could have been missed by our search strategy in this dynamic field. For this reason, we have made the dataset publicly available, and invite colleagues to engage in the collective process of its editing to ensure the accuracy and representativeness of this open-access resource. Our findings might be unsurprising, but warrant a return to Richard Horton’s question: “Who, then, is global health for?” This question draws attention to the complex politics that both drive and emerge from the geographies of GHPs. Interrogating these political drivers should be central to future global health research agendas.

Researching sensitive topics in African cities: reflections on alcohol research in Cape Town

Recent African urbanist scholarship has suggested the need to delve deeper into our understanding of the everyday lived experiences in African cities. While this is essential for our understanding of African cities, researching lived experiences is fraught with methodological and ethical challenges. This is true for any topic when the researcher–subject gap is shaped by differences in nationality, class, race, norms and education, but especially so for the study of sensitive topics such as violence, sexuality, HIV/AIDS and xenophobia. Geographers have begun considering the ethics of researching particular sensitive issues, but not yet fully engaged with the international literature on the ethical and methodological challenges of researching such topics. To begin filling this gap, we reflect on experiences researching the lived experience and policy engagement with alcohol in Cape Town. We seek to apply and adapt the literature on sensitive topics specifically to the South African context. Our paper examines challenges which arose during the fieldwork and strategies developed to mitigate these. We emphasize how examining a topic with strong normative associations, which is bound up with illegality and community divisions, creates a need for particular attentiveness to research methods.