Feature

The City Health and Well-being Podcast

Feature

The City Health and Well-being Podcast

Join SEI researchers in this new podcast series as they explore the pressing issues around how rapidly growing cities are affecting our wellbeing.

Published on 17 May 2023

As urbanization continues to surge, cities have become centres of opportunity for education, employment, and healthcare. However, their rapid expansion often leads to inadequate infrastructure and the degradation of ecological foundations, compromising residents’ well-being and the city’s sustainability. The SEI Initiative on City Health and Well-being has conducted extensive research to address these challenges and aims to discover how cities can become equitable, liveable, and enjoyable places for their inhabitants.

Join us in this new City Health and Well-being podcast series, where SEI scholars share their perspectives and insights on how we can create sustainable and participatory planning for urban environments. We explore the challenges and opportunities of urbanization, and how we can balance economic and business opportunities with people-centric, equitable, and sociable cities.

Hosted by Vishal Mehta, each episode features a different expert who provides in-depth analyses of complex topics and discusses how we can maximize the well-being of urban populations while minimizing resource consumption and without compromising the city’s resilience.

Tune in and be part of the conversation on how we can make cities healthier, happier, and more sustainable. The podcast is available on the following platforms:

Vishal Mehta

Fountain at Pho Si Road/Udon Dutsadi Road roundabout, Udon Thani, Thailand

SEI Initiative on City Health and Well-being

Initiative / This initiative investigates how rapidly growing cities affect residents' wellbeing and how this interacts with the overall health of city systems.

2018 - 2023 / About Cities, Innovation, Participation, Pollution, Sustainable Development Goals, Transport and Wellbeing

Trailer – The City Health and Well-being Podcast

A city provides opportunities for education, jobs and health care, for example, but is that all there is to a good life? Can good health and well being coexist with economic and business opportunities that are also people-centric, liveable, equitable, sociable, and, maybe even, enjoyable? This is the central question that the folks at SEI (Stockholm Environment Institute), have been poring over. And this is exactly what this podcast called the City Health and Well-being podcast intends to understand and share with you. Vishal Mehta, a Senior Scientist at SEI, working in their Davis, California office, who has actually worked on the City Health and Well-being Initiative hosts the podcast, and Gokul Chakravarthy is its producer.

Episode 1 – The City Health and Well-being Initiative

In the first episode of the City Health and Well-being podcast, the host Vishal Mehta is joined by Steve Cinderby from SEI’s York centre in the UK. Steve is one of the co-leads of this Initiative and introduces the Initiative, its purpose, methods, challenges and findings.

Episode 2 – Citizen Science

SEI York’s citizen science research group has expertise in designing, running and evaluating citizen science projects on environmental sustainability topics.

In this episode, Vishal Mehta talks to his colleague, Rachel Pateman from SEI York about citizen science in general and its application in SEI’s City Health and Well-being Initiative.

Episode 3 – Urban Toolbox

In this, third episode, Vishal Mehta introduces one of the outputs of SEI’s City Health and Well-being Initiative, namely the Urban Toolbox for “liveable” cities. This Toolbox is a collection of digital tools that support the understanding of different dimensions of urban sustainability.

Vishal is joined by Diane Archer from SEI’s Asia office in Thailand and Rosie Witton from SEI’s Oxford centre in the UK.

The Urban Toolbox is available now on the the weADAPT platform.

Episode 4 – SEI Africa and Air Pollution

In the fourth episode of the City Health and Well-being podcast, Vishal Mehta talks to Romanus Opiyo, an urban planner by training and SEI’s program head in their Africa center located in Nairobi, Kenya.

In a wide-ranging conversation, this episode summarises almost six years of our initiative’s work in Kenyan cities, especially Nakuru and Nairobi. From citizen science activities including participatory mapping of water, waste and sanitation services, to Fluorosis, the episode then spends time on ongoing air pollution monitoring in the two cities, and the impact it has had on citizens as well as city and county government.

Episode 5 – An Important Stakeholder

In this final episode, Vishal Mehta talks to one of the most important stakeholders that SEI works with in Nakuru, Kenya – Grace Karanja, Nakuru County’s Director of Environment, Energy, Climate Change and Natural Resources.

Together, they unpack the on-ground realities and concerns of the County government of Nakuru, Kenya, that play into the work being done by both the County officials themselves and in collaboration with SEI, Africa in order to make Nakuru a healthy environment where every citizen can have the opportunity to thrive.