Cities for Life

Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA) Place Book Award Winner (2022)

What if cities around the world actively worked to promote the health and healing of all their residents? Cities contribute to the traumas that cause unhealthy stress, with segregated neighbourhoods, insecure housing, few playgrounds, environmental pollution, and unsafe streets, particularly for the poor and residents who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour.

Some cities around the world are already helping their communities heal by investing more in peacemaking and parks than in policing; focusing on community decision-making instead of data surveillance; changing regulations to permit more libraries than liquor stores; and building more affordable housing than highways. These cities are declaring racism a public health and climate change crisis, and taking the lead in generating equitable outcomes.

In Cities for Life, public health expert Jason Corburn shares lessons from three of these cities: Richmond, California; Medellín, Colombia; and Nairobi, Kenya. Corburn draws from his work with citizens, activists, and decision-makers in these cities over a ten-year period, as individuals and communities worked to heal from trauma—from gun violence, housing and food insecurity, and poverty. Corburn shows how any community can rebuild their social institutions, practices, and policies to be more focused on healing and health. This means not only centring those most traumatised in decision-making, Corburn explains, but confronting historically discriminatory, exclusionary, and racist urban institutions, and promoting healing-focused practices, place-making, and public policies.

Cities for Life is essential reading for urban planning, design, healthcare, and public health professionals as they work to reverse entrenched institutional practices through new policies, rules, norms, and laws that address their damage and promote health and healing.