ABSTRACT
Recent years of the Covid-19 pandemic have seen a proportional increase in the amount of time we spend in our homes each day. In spite of this, urban dwellers continue to spend-although varying from area to area of the world-many hours outside their homes for work, daily needs, recreation, and social relationships. This implies that the urban environment, both tangible and intangible, has several factors that can be both protective and risky for health. As highlighted in the 2016 Quito Conference, health can be the pulse of the new urban agenda for sustainable urban development [1]. It is not easy to take stock of where we are. On a global scale, there still seems to be a limited ethical-cultural awareness, a lack of political attention and thus of resource allocation, an insufficient capacity to use innovative choices and technologies and to actively involve local communities in decision-making processes and in the implementation of possible interventions. On the other hand, there are numerous positive experiences of urban realities that have produced convincing efforts in recent decades to make our cities more livable and healthy. Let us hope that the 2030 agenda proposed by the United Nations on the Sustainable Development Goals can really exert a driving role in this direction. A real willingness to set in motion virtuous processes to guarantee us a better quality of urban life, including by agreeing to revise our development and consumption patterns, will make all the difference. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
Recent years of the Covid-19 pandemic have seen a proportional increase in the amount of time we spend in our homes each day. In spite of this, urban dwellers continue to spend-although varying from area to area of the world-many hours outside their homes for work, daily needs, recreation, and social relationships. This implies that the urban environment, both tangible and intangible, has several factors that can be both protective and risky for health. As highlighted in the 2016 Quito Conference, health can be the pulse of the new urban agenda for sustainable urban development [1]. It is not easy to take stock of where we are. On a global scale, there still seems to be a limited ethical-cultural awareness, a lack of political attention and thus of resource allocation, an insufficient capacity to use innovative choices and technologies and to actively involve local communities in decision-making processes and in the implementation of possible interventions. On the other hand, there are numerous positive experiences of urban realities that have produced convincing efforts in recent decades to make our cities more livable and healthy. Let us hope that the 2030 agenda proposed by the United Nations on the Sustainable Development Goals can really exert a driving role in this direction. A real willingness to set in motion virtuous processes to guarantee us a better quality of urban life, including by agreeing to revise our development and consumption patterns, will make all the difference. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.