Reflexive urban health governance: the disappearing commons?

Evelyne de Leeuw, Alana Crimeen, Tracey Ma, Patrick Harris, Jinhee Kim, David Lilley and Julien Forbat

Chapter 9 in Reflexive Urban Governance, 2025, pp 164-182 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: We describe the current state of play in urban health, predominantly in the Global North with case material from Australia. Health in the urban context touches on any domain within urban development, be it social, technical, design or natural (‘urban morphology’), or political. In order to arrive at a reflection on reflexive governance in the urban health sphere, we describe the emergence of health as a prominent dimension in urban development. This dimension, we then show, goes by monikers that extend beyond a ‘Healthy City’ framing to include other ‘Theme Cities’ such as Happy, Smart and Resilient Cities. Additionally, within the more uniquely health-framed urban networks, we show that uniquely separated cliques and paradigms pursue highly varied – and separated – research and policy goals and objectives. These range from medical-industrial views to social movement dimensions. This variation is then illustrated and analysed through a number of Australian case studies. They look at spatial concentrations of human and economic urban activity (the ‘precinct’) with healthcare and aviation-based examples prominent. These spatially determined urban health efforts in Australia are often part of ‘City Deals’ – economically neoliberal efforts at urban partnership development. We conclude with two cases that show that these – slightly more ideological – policy ontologies do not align with issues such as Aboriginal transport justice and social housing solutions. In all, we show how active and passive reflexive capacity on health in urban development should happen but is hardly realised.

Keywords: Urban networks; Australia; Case studies; Precincts; Urban politics; Housing; Aboriginal; Paradigms (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781803927336
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781803927343.00015 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:21767_9

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().