Dr. David Vlahov, the founding President of ISUH, provides a history of the ISUH and gives context for its future directions.
From its inception in 2002 and its first conference in Toronto, ISUH is intended to create a dialogue to define urban health. Over time the annual conferences provide an opportunity for members to connect. The first conference focused on inner city health in high-income countries. It is at the second meeting, held at the New York Academy of Medicine in New York City, where a conceptual framework was developed that focused on the social determinants of health that affect individual behavior. Subsequent conferences in Baltimore, Amsterdam, Nairobi, Boston, Vancouver, Manchester, and Dhaka expanded ISUH’s global perspective and reach. It was the work of ISUH that influenced WHO’s Year of Urban Health.
ISUH was seen as the only NGO that brought together researchers in urban health from around the world. The idea was for ISUH to become a mobilizing force for disseminating evidence for improving urban health. This is what lead to ISUH’s value proposition as the only global organization focused on urban health.
The future of ISUH should include a focus now on providing trans-disciplinary education, the development of a shared vocabulary for team collaboration, and the leveraging of this expertise by turning research into education. Another part of our future should include taking research into the policy arena and being advocates for populations that live in urban settings, particularly for those that are more disadvantaged – making coherent recommendations. Membership engagement through virtual regional activities and panels should be part of ISUH’s future as well.
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Dr. David Vlahov, the founding President of ISUH, provides a history of the ISUH and gives context for its future directions.
From its inception in 2002 and its first conference in Toronto, ISUH is intended to create a dialogue to define urban health. Over time the annual conferences provide an opportunity for members to connect. The first conference focused on inner city health in high-income countries. It is at the second meeting, held at the New York Academy of Medicine in New York City, where a conceptual framework was developed that focused on the social determinants of health that affect individual behavior. Subsequent conferences in Baltimore, Amsterdam, Nairobi, Boston, Vancouver, Manchester, and Dhaka expanded ISUH’s global perspective and reach. It was the work of ISUH that influenced WHO’s Year of Urban Health.
ISUH was seen as the only NGO that brought together researchers in urban health from around the world. The idea was for ISUH to become a mobilizing force for disseminating evidence for improving urban health. This is what lead to ISUH’s value proposition as the only global organization focused on urban health.
The future of ISUH should include a focus now on providing trans-disciplinary education, the development of a shared vocabulary for team collaboration, and the leveraging of this expertise by turning research into education. Another part of our future should include taking research into the policy arena and being advocates for populations that live in urban settings, particularly for those that are more disadvantaged – making coherent recommendations. Membership engagement through virtual regional activities and panels should be part of ISUH’s future as well.
Professor Giles-Corti is a public health academic and has been working in the built environment and health space for two decades. Most of her research is with sectors outside of health – urban planners, landscape architects, etc. She is really pleased to see that the health sector is getting into the built environment and health area. Her work has been focused on creating evidence for thinkers and actors outside of health to influence policy and practice. She describes her efforts as a very interesting journey. The evidence-base has been important for sustaining multi-sector partnerships.
When Professor Giles-Corti refers to the health sector, she is focused on the use of the health budgets less on the health care system and more on health promotion, disease prevention, and the environment. She feels that the health sector’s role in asking the other sectors to create conditions for doing health has been late coming. That is partly because we haven’t had the quantitative evidence. It has taken a long time to get the evidence. There has been a lot of sophisticated conversations going on over the last year and when we need to change cities we need to use natural experiments. That is increasingly valued. We are creating this wonderful multidisciplinary database on interventions and associations in focusing on the role of cities in diseases in general.
Professor Giles-Corti sees ISUH playing a major role in getting researchers to think differently about how we do research. If you want to change cities and influence health, you really have to influence the policy environment. She sees the ISUH conferences as opportunities for engaging policy makers and practitioners with researchers in innovative ways for generating policy-relevant research. Such research should be co-designed and resonate with the people you are trying to influence. This can be very exciting applied scientific work – applying innovative techniques focused on a particular problem that a city is trying to solve. ISUH can be a space for discussing how to do research that makes a difference and influences policy makers.
Conversations on Urban Health - Dr Yonette Thomas
Dr. David Vlahov, the founding President of ISUH, provides a history of the ISUH and gives context for its future directions.
From its inception in 2002 and its first conference in Toronto, ISUH is intended to create a dialogue to define urban health. Over time the annual conferences provide an opportunity for members to connect. The first conference focused on inner city health in high-income countries. It is at the second meeting, held at the New York Academy of Medicine in New York City, where a conceptual framework was developed that focused on the social determinants of health that affect individual behavior. Subsequent conferences in Baltimore, Amsterdam, Nairobi, Boston, Vancouver, Manchester, and Dhaka expanded ISUH’s global perspective and reach. It was the work of ISUH that influenced WHO’s Year of Urban Health.
ISUH was seen as the only NGO that brought together researchers in urban health from around the world. The idea was for ISUH to become a mobilizing force for disseminating evidence for improving urban health. This is what lead to ISUH’s value proposition as the only global organization focused on urban health.
The future of ISUH should include a focus now on providing trans-disciplinary education, the development of a shared vocabulary for team collaboration, and the leveraging of this expertise by turning research into education. Another part of our future should include taking research into the policy arena and being advocates for populations that live in urban settings, particularly for those that are more disadvantaged – making coherent recommendations. Membership engagement through virtual regional activities and panels should be part of ISUH’s future as well.
