Naturvation - H2020 (Urban Nature-based Solutions and Innovation)

Traditional interventions to "bring nature into the city" were often motivated by a concern to create forms of public space which would provide a public good. Despite such well-intentioned motivations, these public forms of urban nature have always been to some extent bounded, serving some in favor of others, authorizing particular uses and forms of behavior as more or less legitimate, and policing the boundaries of who is/not included in such space. In this paper, we argue that new interventions seeking to bring nature-based solutions (NBS) into the city serve to further trouble these boundaries. NBS seek to use nature to address urban sustainability challenges and they navigate and serve to reconfigure what is (and is not) public in the city. We draw on research undertaken in three cities-Newcastle (United Kingdom), Cape Town (South Africa) and Athens (Greece) to explore the ways in which notions of the private and the public are being remade with and through nature, and its implications for how we might understand urban politics. Our conclusions point to the need for governance arrangements that can support the long-term stewardship of nature in the public interest and with due accountability and we suggest three arrangements. ARTICLE HISTORY

In global cities, the impacts of gentrification on the lives and well-being of socially vulnerable residents have occupied political agendas. Yet to date, research on how gentrification affects a multiplicity of health outcomes has remained scarce. While much of the nascent quantitative research helps to identify associations between gentrification and determined health outcomes, it tends to draw from static datasets collected for other studies to draw a posteriori and non-longitudinal conclusions. There is little attention in traditional public health research to purposely understand the health impacts of the complex, multi-layered, and rapid change produced by gentrification. Moreover, few studies examine the pathways and socio-spatial dynamics of the association between gentrification and health. In response, we use qualitative data collected in Boston and Barcelona to comprehensively identify how the health and well-being of long-term residents may be affected by gentrification and to call for new multi-methods research. In this initial assessment, we find a range of potential detrimental factors and potential pathways associated with gentrification, including individual-level physical and mental health outcomes such as obesity, asthma, chronic stress, and depression; neighborhood-level health determinants such as safety and new drug-dealing/use; and institutional-level health determinants such as healthcare precarity and worsened school conditions.