Good health is an essential component of our ability to thrive on a personal and collective level. Whilst the relationship to our health is largely perceived as a personal responsibility and a phenomenon that has been individualised in prescription and treatment by the services around us, our exploration through this dimension seeks to collectively broaden and interrogate this common understanding of health. What happens when we begin to think beyond health services that treat illness and injury, beyond our individual behaviours and inherent biological make up, and instead consider the systemic ways in which our environments impact health outcomes?
Centric Lab — a research lab that uses neuroscience, ecological research, social justice principles and geospatial data to understand how the places we live impact our health — call for health to be reframed as an ecological phenomenon, acknowledging the close association between our exposure to environmental pollutants and psychological stress with poor health outcomes (Centric Lab, 2022).
Foundational to Centric Lab’s framing is that health is an output that results from varying factors:
“Health is the ability for our biological systems to enter stability after experiencing trauma or stress throughout our entire lifetime, to give us all an equal opportunity to realise our full potential.”
—Centric Lab, What Is Health?
To give examples, air pollution is associated with health outcomes such as dementia, respiratory diseases, and diabetes; noise pollution with poor sleep, cardiovascular diseases and anxiety; light pollution with obesity, fatigue and depression; heat pollution with cardiovascular diseases, respiratory complications and heat stroke. Psychological stress from experiencing poverty, discrimination or violence can also be a factor in chronic disease, and COVID-19 has had disproportionate impacts on Black and People of Colour (BPOC) / global majority communities due to higher likelihood to be in key worker jobs with increased exposure, living in intergenerational homes and experiencing medical racism that disrupts interventions (Raymond-Williams, 2020).
Critically, Centric Lab have been able to demonstrate in no uncertain terms that health is a systemic, deeply interconnected issue and understanding this effectively has the potential to create proactive, preventative solutions that increase a place’s ability to safeguard human and beyond human health (Centric Lab, 2020).
<aside> ➕ Araceli Camargo, lead scientist at Centric Lab, has also contributed to our Reimagining Economic Possibilities series with a piece called Can we transition from Economy to Ecology? exploring the ideas of health justice through the lens of indigenous wisdoms, practices and Kinship for liberation, which you can read here.
Can we transition from Economy to Ecology?
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In this dimension we explore health through this lens, offering a systemic understanding of what health is. For more in depth understanding of the framing of health that Centric Lab have been pioneering in, you can explore more of their work here.
You can also explore how Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL) introduce the Health dimension of the Local Social lens on slide 14 of the Doughnut Unrolled: Dimensions of the Four Lenses tool.
In the Birmingham Development Plan (2017), Birmingham City Council envisages that:
“Birmingham’s residents will be experiencing a high quality of life, living within attractive and well designed sustainable neighbourhoods.” (Birmingham City Council, 2017)
We have adopted this as our target for the health dimension.