Cities & Systems

This report highlights the cultural and practical changes needed to protect Nature in cities and embrace the existing relationships and knowledges. This report provides its readers a new lens in looking at Nature by investigating the different epistemologies, ways of understanding, of health, nature, and community.

The purpose of this Systems of Power board is to build confidence for community and grassroots led advocacy in health justice issues as they navigate political and governmental systems and their layers of entrenched power.

This project brought together people with knowledges across a variety of policy, organising in healthcare and the criminal justice system, as well as environmental and climate justice. 

Cities should be places that sustain life for all Peoples and other than human Kin. One pathway is to incorporate Traditional Ecological Knowledges into urban systems. Indigenous and Land cultures have a lot of Knowledges that are relevant in making urban spaces life sustaining and contribute to ending the dysregulation of our planetary systems.

These are working principles set forth by a group of Indigenous Peoples and Land-Kinned Peoples who gathered in the UK. We see this both as a starting point and an evolving process. These principles are the first iteration, as they interact with more Peoples they will change and evolve. 

Grace’s current writing and scholarship are focused on restorative and transformative justice, tribal criminal law and jurisdiction, tribal court and justice innovation, critical Indigenous studies, ethnic studies, decolonisation theory, and abolition theory.

The pathways to poor health outcomes for Indigenous Peoples are multifaceted and interconnected. Here, we provide a brief overview of some of the mechanisms by which the devastating effects of colonisation, forced assimilation, displacement, and systemic oppression contribute to health disparities of indigenous peoples.

The purpose of this data led study is to bring attention to everyday people those who have the right to pollute in their neighbourhoods, so that people can make more informed decisions when it comes to voting and priorities for our shared health and climate change action points.

The intention of this audio project is to discuss the links between systems and imaginations rooted in supremacy, the dysregulation of planetary systems, and the poor health outcomes being experienced by peoples who are racialised and minoritised.

When people can no longer use their home to heal and feel that they are in a place of rest, they are at greater risk of not restoring. The home in the case of higher costs is no longer a healer but a harmer.

Regeneration is a word used to promote positive benefit from construction and urbanisation. It promotes that through the investment there are social benefits that trickle down. However, construction on old gas works sites without biologically adequate provisions are putting various communities across the UK at high risk for poor health outcomes.

We rarely speak about the toxification of Land in the UK at the hands of industrialisation, instead the general public is shamed and gaslit for their systemic need to get into a motor vehicle. All the while, millions of tonnes of chemicals are churned out into the environment; polluting water ways, natural habitats, and the air we all breathe.

On the 3rd August 2021, we attended the public meeting held between Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council, Public Health England, Staffordshire County Council, the Environment Agency, and the community where Walleys Quarry Landfill site is located. This letter is a list of our thoughts and concerns based on our experience as neuroscientists working on public health issues.

This document will look at how industry gaslights communities, the mistakes science makes, and the significance of listening and acknowledging the lived experience. This report is for both practitioners and citizens who are experiencing environmental and health injustice.

This report is for those working in transport planning and in policy and who are interested in understanding the link between equitable mobility and health. This report will lay out the need for equitable solutions around transport, how health is related to mobility, and a breakdown of equitable mobility zones.

Regeneration is a word used frequently in the built environment sector. It posits that as long as urbanisation is cast as regeneration it is a force for good. However, this is an inaccurate statement given that despite new housing units being delivered, social, economic and health inequalities continue and house prices continue to outpace earned salaries. 

The average citizen does not often have the ability to actively investigate the role their environment has in contributing to their health. This is especially true of factors they have no personal control over or are not directly related to their personal activities. Environmental risk factors are often a result of larger infrastructure and activity, such as construction, traffic activity, population density, and presence of green and blue space.

In any given area, there will be people who are suffering greatly from the consequences of air pollution whilst others may not see any consequences. This phenomenon is worth understanding, rather than dismissing it as not statistically significant.

This paper looks to approach the inequitable prevalence of COVID-19 from a biological perspective, drawing a clear throughline between human health and urban environments. Specifically, its relation to COVID-19 in BAME communities of London.

In the following report, we put gathering evidence to highlight the susceptibility of the Southall community and the need for stricter air pollution guidelines.

PTSD is growing in urban environments and its prevalence is disproportionately higher within impoverished neighbourhoods. PTSD is now prevalent in “general public” populations, this means that it’s growing in populations who have not been to war (veterans) or experienced war (refugees) or suffered from an acute natural disaster. 

The government published a consultation on proposed changes to the National Planning Policy Framework on 30 July 2024. It included questions and proposed changes on a number of topics, which have implications for people’s health and wellbeing. This paper sets out Centric Lab’s responses to questions and policy changes and how they influence health.