Complex Systems, Climate Change, Urban Health and the Human Scale: An Evolutionary Complex Systems Perspective on Urban Health

Abstract

"Deliberations about how to govern complex problems of climate change, urban health and wellbeing, sustainably and yet in accordance with human needs, have often been implicitly biased by well-intended ideas such as being ‘human-scale’ or ‘people-centred’. With increasing urban populations and increasing urban systems interconnectivity, cities as we knew them transform into city regions or clusters and the externalized costs of such growth are increasingly shared with people who become marginalized and detached. We present ‘human-scale’ and ‘people-oriented’ ideas of urban development from an evolutionary systems perspective, as expressions of two types of socio-political organisation with different degrees of self-organisation. We refer to multi-level selection theory to explain the maladies of current urban developments, their negative impacts on people’s health, the environment and the reasons for denial or not being able or willing to act in response to the available knowledge about urban and planetary health problems. Finally, we make recommendations for governance to address the systemic problems of urban health."