International Conference on Urban Health, Wellington, NZ

Earlier this month, a team from Healthy Cities Australia travelled to Wellington in Aotearoa, New Zealand to take part in the 21st annual International Conference on Urban Health (ICUH). We went to share our stories about preventive health in Australia and to learn effective strategies from practitioners and researchers from around the world. 

We touched down in Wellington on a beautiful sunny day and were able to see the city and its harbour at its finest. Stepping inside the brand new Takina function centre, we attended a moving opening ceremony led by local Māori people in the Te Reo language. The ceremony involved Indigenous delegates from the Pacific, the United States, and Australia as well as the conference organisers, who showed their respect for the local Indigenous culture by also singing in Te Reo. Following the opening ceremony, a local dance troupe led us on a journey across the Pacific, telling the story of how Māori people first came to the islands of Aotearoa. 

Indigenous perspectives were front and centre in this Pacific event. Indigenous colleagues explained how Indigenous people’s health is deeply connected with culture and land and that Indigenous health outcomes are intricately bound up with ongoing struggles against colonialism. In one plenary session, Liz Mellish of the Palmerston North Trust responsible for Maori-owned lands around Wellington explained how her people are fighting to preserve the quality of the freshwater streams that flow through the city of Wellington. These streams, like many urban waterways, have been hidden inside concrete culverts and become polluted, threatening the water quality of the harbour and access to traditional foodways such as fishing. Through taking the Crown to court in the Wai Manawa Whenua case, Maori are seeking restitution of their cultural rights and responsibilities for freshwater in order to protect the waterways and establish a fair, enduring water allocation system that will benefit the health of all New Zealanders. 

Healthy Cities Australia staff at the conference shared insights from our Breathe Better Illawarra program’s work on asthma prevention through advocacy around indoor gas appliances, Fair Food Illawarra’s community coalition building for sustainable food futures, and Cook Chill Chat’s recipe for social inclusion through community-based cooking and nutrition education. Many of our colleagues in the Healthy Cities movement in Australia were also at the conference. Jinhee Kim from UNSW Cities Institute convened a panel of practitioners to discuss how approaches that transcend traditional disciplines in research and practice can produce more equitable outcomes for people’s health. Our CEO Kelly Andrews joined a panel of researchers from the Global Observatory of Healthy and Sustainable Cities at RMIT in Melbourne to discuss how objective measurements of how well cities work to promote health can be a powerful tool for advocacy, particularly when combined with the human stories of urban health. We were also delighted to connect with our colleagues from Healthy Environments and Lives (HEAL) based at University of Canberra, a national research network that provides evidence on environmental health. 

We learned a great deal about the impact our built environment has on our health and how programs around the world are working to shape it to create healthier cities. Participants at a plenary session on this topic highlighted how modifications to the built environment can address health challenges from road trauma, to housing-related illness and climate change. Skye Duncan from the Global Designing Cities Initiative, for example, emphasised that traffic accidents are the number one killer of children and young people around the world. Her organisation works with cities to redesign their streets, changing the way traffic flows and prioritising pedestrians to create places for children to play in once congested areas. Similarly, David Jacobs from the National Centre for Healthy Housing in the United States explained how poorly designed housing can contribute to a range of diseases, including asthma. We need housing that is dry, clean, well-ventilated and able to withstand extremes of heat and cold. Otherwise we see people being discharged from hospital for housing-related illnesses having to return to the same buildings that made them ill in the first place. 

The Healthy Cities team returned from this international gathering full of new ideas for how we can work to make Australian cities healthier, combining the best scientific evidence with the lived experiences and stories that can help us to make a difference.