"Tackling the Root Causes Upstream of Unhealth Urban Development" is a trans-disciplinary research project seeking to map and understand urban development decision-making, visualise stakeholder mental models and codevelop improvement interventions. The project's primary data was gathered through 123 semistructured interviews. This article applies, compares, and discusses four variations on a method for constructing causal loop diagrams to illuminate mental models and collective decision-making, based on manual and semiautomated processes applied to individual interview transcripts and datasets collected by thematic analysis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPoor quality urban environments substantially increase non-communicable disease. Responsibility for associated decision-making is dispersed across multiple agents and systems: fast growing urban authorities are the primary gatekeepers of new development and change in the UK, yet the driving forces are remote private sector interests supported by a political economy focused on short-termism and consumption-based growth. Economic valuation of externalities is widely thought to be fundamental, yet evidence on how to value and integrate it into urban development decision-making is limited, and it forms only a part of the decision-making landscape.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFor over a decade, pandemics have been on the UK National Risk Register as both the likeliest and most severe of threats. Non-infectious 'lifestyle' diseases were already crippling our healthcare services and our economy. COVID-19 has exposed two critical vulnerabilities: firstly, the UK's failure to adequately assess and communicate the severity of non-communicable disease; secondly, the health inequalities across our society, due not least to the poor quality of our urban environments.
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