LSE Cities Urban Age Conference Report

Cities are critical sites for enquiry and action in relation to health and well-being. With up to 70 per cent of the world’s population estimated to be living in urban areas by 2050 1 , global health will be determined increasingly in cities. As Africa and Asia become the locus of urbanisation, researchers and policy-makers are increasingly contextualising, questioning or even moving beyond the urban health knowledge and approaches we have developed over the past century mainly in Western Europe and North America. The existence of significant urban health inequalities even within rich cities, often stubbornly resisting the efforts of public policy to reduce them, also continue to demand our attentions. In response to these challenges, the 2011 Urban Age Hong Kong conference, organized by the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Alfred Herrhausen Society in partnership with the University of Hong Kong, brought together over 170 planners, architects, sociologists, medical doctors, public health experts and economists from 36 cities and 22 countries to help identify the routes through which new meanings, methods and interventions for health and well-being might be developed for greater effect in today’s cities.