About

We define ‘urban health’ as a term used to investigate the intersectional lived experiences of urban dwellers. It focuses on the unique influence urbanisation has on our biological systems through exposure to environmental and psychosocial stressors.

The word “council” has its etymological roots in the Latin word “concalare”; “con” meaning together and “calare” meaning summon. The word council is akin to that of the early 20th century soviets in Russia; self-organised worker groups opposing top-down representation and centralisation, and that of the Zapatista caracoles in Chiapas, Mexico; a confederalist system of organising where power is not thought of through political representation in the form of proletarian dictatorship but of “democratising the power relations of everyday life”.

The word council has a long history of being a structure for bottom up organising. Its flexibility allows for autonomy to flourish, meaning that communities can enact their version and vision of an urban health council - one that works for their health needs. 

This Urban Health Council’s role is to summon together people under an autonomous method of governance and practice whereby peer-led programmes determine the direction of production of works that support health justice movements, led by the People for the People, meeting them where they are with what they need. Each programme is supported through a scientific, technical and financial ecosystem where all works produced are made open-access in a Living Encyclopedia. This Urban Health Council set up by Centric Lab must not be the only one, there needs to be an ecosystem of councils embodying the principles as outlined previously.

Away from top down power, we can have a politics of health recognising inclusion, empathy, and healing and the emancipation of people marginalised, brutalised, shamed, and made worse by prejudicial health systems and knowledges rooted in colonial framings of humanity.

When many sites of self-governance emerge investigating, strategising, producing together we will have an infrastructure for healing and health justice. As this report has stated, this architecture for epistemic justice needs a resourced radical knowledge infrastructure to allow its development to occur organically, for the emergence of a Zapatismo pluriverse: “a world in which many worlds fit”.

Arora and Sterling provide a simple yet powerful summary of the pluriverse based on Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser’s 2018 Proposals for a World of Many Worlds: 

Each of these worlds has its own ways of relating between different beings, human and nonhuman. Each world produces its own languages and techniques mediating relations between humans and with nonhumans. Through these relations, diverse knowledges and practices are produced to connect and communicate across categorical divides between nature and culture. Each world is thus composed by specific ways of living-knowing.