Article Text
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic crisis has compromised the ‘healthy cities’ vision, as it has unveiled the need to give more prominence to caring tasks while addressing intersectional social inequities and environmental injustices. However, much-needed transdisciplinary approaches to study and address post-COVID-19 healthy cities challenges and agendas have been scarce so far. To address this gap, we propose a ‘just ecofeminist healthy cities’ research approach, which would be informed by the caring city, environmental justice, just ecofeminist sustainability and the healthy cities paradigms and research fields. Our proposed approach aims to achieve the highest standards of human health possible for the whole population—yet putting the health of socially underprivileged residents in the centre—through preserving and/or improving the existing physical, social and political environment. Importantly, the proposed approach recognises all spheres of daily life (productive, reproductive, personal and political) and their connections with inequities, justice and power dynamics. Last, the just ecofeminist healthy cities approach understands human health as interconnected with the health of non-human animals and the ecosystem. We illustrate the proposed new approach focusing on the implications for women’s health and public green spaces research and propose principles and practices for its operationalisation.
- COVID-19
- health inequalities
- environmental health
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Footnotes
Contributors All authors contributed conceptually to the paper. MT-M wrote the first draft and refined the manuscript. IA and HC provided substantial feedback and edits.
Funding HC is funded by a Juan de la Cierva fellowships [FJCI-2018-035322] awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. The research presented in this paper received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program [grant agreement No. 678034] but the sponsor had no role in the design or analysis of this study. All authors contributed conceptually to the paper. MTM wrote the first draft and refined the manuscript. IA and HC provided substantial feedback and edits.
Competing interests None declared.
Provenance and peer review Commissioned; externally peer reviewed.