A city provides opportunities for education, jobs and health care, for example, but is that all there is to a good life? Can good health and well being coexist with economic and business opportunities that are also people-centric, liveable, equitable, sociable, and, maybe even, enjoyable? This is the central question that the folks at SEI (Stockholm Environment Institute), have been poring over. And this is exactly what this podcast called the City Health and Wellbeing podcast intends to understand and share with you. Vishal Mehta, a Senior Scientist at SEI, working in their Davis, California office, who has actually worked on the City Health and Wellbeing Initiative hosts the podcast, and Gokul Chakravarthy is its producer.
In this first episode of the City Health and Wellbeing podcast, Vishal is joined by Steve Cinderby from SEI's York centre in the UK. Steve is one of the co-leads of this Initiative and introduces the Initiative, its purpose, methods, challenges and findings.
A city provides opportunities for education, jobs and health care, for example, but is that all there is to a good life? Can good health and well being coexist with economic and business opportunities that are also people-centric, liveable, equitable, sociable, and, maybe even, enjoyable? This is the central question that the folks at SEI (Stockholm Environment Institute), have been poring over. And this is exactly what this podcast called the City Health and Wellbeing podcast intends to understand and share with you. Vishal Mehta, a Senior Scientist at SEI, working in their Davis, California office, who has actually worked on the City Health and Wellbeing Initiative hosts the podcast, and Gokul Chakravarthy is its producer.
In this first episode of the City Health and Wellbeing podcast, Vishal is joined by Steve Cinderby from SEI's York centre in the UK. Steve is one of the co-leads of this Initiative and introduces the Initiative, its purpose, methods, challenges and findings.
Gokul Chakravarthy 00:05
If you feel your anxiety rising, just listening to these noises, maybe you're lucky not to be one of those millions of citizens of several fast growing cities around the world, for whom this is such a daily reality that it has gone beyond just the realm of anxiety, they've become numb to it. Living in one city myself, I can safely say, it's not pretty. Noise is one thing, we then also have to reckon with things like air quality, availability of water, getting around, community spaces, so on and so forth. And those are just manmade factors. Don't even get me started on the natural factors. And we put up with all of this in the ostentatious pursuit of "a better life". But is it really better? Of course, the city provides more opportunities for education, jobs and health care, for example, but is that all there is to a good life? Can good health and well being coexist with economic and business opportunities that are also people-centric, livable, equitable, sociable, and dare I say, enjoyable? This is the central question that the good folks at SEI, or the Stockholm Environment Institute, have been poring over. And this is exactly what this podcast called the City Health and Wellbeing podcast intends to understand and share with you. Vishal Mehta, a Senior Scientist at SEi, working in the Davis, California office, who has actually worked on the City Health and Wellbeing Initiative hosts the podcast, and I, Gokul Chakravarthy, am its producer.
Vishal Mehta 02:10
Well, hello, and welcome to our first episode of the City Health and Wellbeing podcast. I'm your host, Vishal Mehta. Joining me today Steve Cinderby from SEI's York centre in the UK. Steve is one of the co-leads of this Initiative. Welcome, Steve, and thanks for being here today.
Steve Cinderby 02:29
Yeah, thanks, Vishal.0
Vishal Mehta 02:30
Would you like to introduce yourself to the audience?
Steve Cinderby 02:32
I'm co-leading this Initiative with colleagues from SEI Asia, and it's been running now for five and a bit years. And we're entering our final phase. So it's been a really interesting opportunity to look at this challenge of how to make cities healthy, resilient into the future to promote wellbeing for the way the city works, but also how the people are living there.
Vishal Mehta 02:58
I was thinking that we could start with sharing some motivations in doing this... this kind of research. And you know, for me, it's very personal. Because I grew up in Bengaluru (Bangalore), in South India, the Silicon Valley of India now for quite a while. And when I grew up the word, in Indian terms, is "small city"... 4.7 million people. And I was easily able to get around and had the most beautiful childhood, anybody could have, I think, but now it's more than 12 million people and the city has really completely changed in many ways. And it's very difficult to get around. There's a lot of traffic. Services lag behind the immense speed of change and growth. So for me, it's pretty... it's pretty personal relationship that I have. And you know, cities are, I think fabulous beasts, they inspire creativity and innovation, a lot of civic pride; the engines of economic growth. At the same time, they can be very difficult places to live in, if you're not lucky, like I was and am, millions of people come to cities for a better life ending up in terrifying conditions in... in urban slums/ informal settlements. So that's my motivation. And as you know, we have this entire project on Bangalore urban metabolism as part of this urban sustainability portfolio that we have in SEI. So I was wondering if you can share some of your personal sort of interest in this... to start us off?
Steve Cinderby 04:29
Yeah, so I've got I've got a mixture of kind of professional interest in... in my time at SEI. I've been lucky enough to work in rural settings, trying to understand development challenges there, but then also in cities in different parts of the world. And I think the reason I've got more and more interested in cities is partly this transition we're going through where, now, the majority of the world's population have tipped into living into cities for the first time in our history. And as you said, I've got a kind of personal stake in it, if you like, or interest in that I was born in Africa, and I've, over my life, I've spent lots of trips back and forward to Africa, and seen firsthand how their cities have evolved through that time. And as you mentioned, the kind of increasing challenges they're facing with rising populations, the growth of informal settlements, the growth of motorised transport across cities, and increasing pollution levels. So all this challenge is being brought together at the same time when more and more people are being exposed to these kinds of environments. So it's that mixture of professional interest and feeling we could make a difference. And also a personal interest in actually experiencing these things firsthand, and how things are evolving.
Vishal Mehta 05:54
You know, the title itself, City Health and Wellbeing frames our entry point into looking at urban issues. So maybe you could...we could talk about health and well being, you know, how do we distinguish this? How do we couple human dimensions of change versus the environment we live in, how do we try to work on both topics at once.
Steve Cinderby 06:18
So, as you said, it's titled City Health and Wellbeing, we kind of mean by that both the health of the city, so how the systems in the city are functioning, and the interaction that has then with the health of people living in those spaces. So that was our kind of starting point. And the wellbeing dimension is... is partly because of the increasing interest we've seen in lots of dimensions around mental health issues and the psychology of living in urban settings. So it's bringing that novelty of a new way of including that... that interest into looking at how developing cities are affecting people's mental health and wellbeing. So, moving beyond the, sort of, direct physical health interactions of, say, air pollution on people's respiratory health, through to their actual... how they experienced the city and how that affects their day-to-day well being.
Vishal Mehta 07:18
Yeah, Steve, you mentioned about some of the components of the work we did. Shall we elaborate a bit more and talk about the citizen science aspects of it, the interactions with local stakeholders and governments, and also the two cities we chose?
Steve Cinderby 07:37
Yeah, so I'll start with the two cities, because that's been our focus for the past five years. So we were interested in working in what are called secondary cities. So these are the smaller, developing places in all over the world. So not the capital cities, but slightly smaller places, often places that get less funding, less research interest, and have less capacity to monitor and evaluate how the choices they're making are affecting the health and well being of the people living in the city. So we picked these smaller places, one in Thailand, where we have our office in Asia, one in Kenya, where we've got the SEI Africa centre, to try and work in those places where we could develop strong relationships, both with local authorities in most places, but also the communities that are actually living there. And the two cities we've picked quite different in some ways, in... in Kenya, in Nakuru, there's a growing population, there's a pressure to densify the city... so, what I mean by that is more people living in the same land area, which usually means going upwards in terms of buildings, and maybe building on what are currently open spaces. And, in Udon, in Thailand, it's pressures for economic development. So that, again, puts a pressure on the land and the way the land is used in the city. But beyond that, there's quite a lot of variation between the two. So Kenya, you've got a much younger population and the population of the city's rapidly growing as it... as it tries to expand. In Udon, you've got actually an ageing population. So the two places allow us to look at this contrasting types of people that live there. And obviously, you know, we've got our Kenya and a Thailand example with quite different cultures, histories, and governance arrangements in some ways. So similar in some dimensions different in others, which I think proved really useful for us as well as quite challenging sometimes to understand how those differences are affecting things. And then yes, in terms of the citizen science, we've had two kinds of approaches, if you like. As researchers, we've had our questions that we think we need to understand and unpack, to understand how the way the city's function is affecting its health and wellbeing. But we're also very mindful of trying to understand the questions and the issues the local people and the local authorities in those places are most concerned about, and then working alongside them, to see if we can help address those things. So, from the... kind of... citizens' side, the residents' side, one of the methods we've used most effectively, I think, is what's called citizen science. So the main way we've used that is actually to ask the community what their biggest concerns and questions are. And then as scientists try to work out approaches that we could use to collect data, and analyse it in ways that can be useful for understanding or addressing the problems that the people have told us about. And we've done that in both cities, mainly focused actually around quite similar issues of waste, and waste management, but also infrastructure quality and the damage to infrastructure that affects people's lives as they live in these places. So the citizen science approach has been really helpful, I think, in engaging with the people that live there, and... and actually starting to have some impact on improving things in their day to day life.
Vishal Mehta 11:29
Yes, and I'd like to just add one thing is that, you know, when in development work and NGOs and that work internationally, one of the serious challenges is when the project is done. This particular initiative is what it's in, it's like fith year, I think, or, or something like that. Six? Okay... and two years through the pandemic as well. And the choice of the cities was also very cognizant of this fact that, once the project is over, the... you know, all that's been generated can flounder and lead to, not much. And, in our case, that's why these cities were chosen is because we had offices in those countries... and centres... and our local presence that has been there for a long time... and will continue. And so that ensures to some level continuity and our involvement.
Steve Cinderby 12:34
Yeah, exactly. So, I mean... exactly, like you said, one of the difficulties or challenges of being a research organisation, is we're quite funding dependent and that drives a lot of what we do. And often that means you get a short term amount of funding to go and work in a place, engage on a topic with the community, hopefully make some difference. But then, potentially, you disappear, the funding vanishes, you move to the next place, the next challenge, and you might leave something behind, but often not very much for the community that you're engaging with. So there's two ways we've kind of tried to leave a legacy. One is, all the information we've collected, we've been trying to take back to either the local communities or the local authorities, so that they can actually have access to it into the future, and make use of it into their planning and decision making. We've also hopefully got the potential now because we have such long standing relationships, to attract new funding that we could actually continue working in those places. And the best example, at the moment of that is colleagues and SEI Africa, that are working alongside the local authority in Nakuru, on a new activity that's expanded on one of the things we did, which is to actually look at air pollution issues. And they're working alongside the local authority now to expand a network of low cost sensors so that they can continue to do that monitoring it for the local authority, but also from a research perspective, but into the future. So hopefully, we won't just be an activity that finishes and everybody has good feelings about it, but then forgets about it. Hopefully, we'll continue to have these relationships into the future in these places.
Gokul Chakravarthy 14:28
This made me wonder. At a very high level, what was the dynamic of the working relationship between the team from SEI and the local communities or authorities or the combination thereof? So I asked them.
Steve Cinderby 14:47
By becoming more collaborative rather than parachuting in and just saying we're interested in this topic and you're going to help us with it, we turn that around to we're interested in how the city is affecting you, tell us what your problems are... and we'll see whether we can work to address that.
Vishal Mehta 15:05
And also, on that front Gokul, there's a lot of work on the colonisation of research. You know, there's... it's a big deal now. And it continues to be that the questions are framed elsewhere from the Global North. And that still continues. And there's a lot of history behind that, as you know. So we won't get into that. But going from more a consultative role to the problem forming role, we hope that the communities we work with, we start with that it's like they they formulate the problem first.
Steve Cinderby 15:44
Yeah. And I mean, just building on two points, I suppose. In both places, we were lucky in that... say, in Nakuru, they had this programme in the city to beautify the city, partly from a sort of touristic potential, but also, obviously, to benefit the people living there. And that involves potentially the planting of lots of new green space or development of new parks. So we were lucky that they were interested in that topic. And that was a kind of a good entry point for some of our questions. So there was a sort of synergy, if you like, between what we were hoping to do and what the authority was interested in. And similarly, in Udon Thani, the Mayor was interested in making the city walkable... a walkable space and a walkable city. And again, that connected with this sort of idea of health and wellbeing and the kinds of spaces people were walking through. So that... that made it much more welcoming than it perhaps might be, if you were a more traditional science research question of just work on it with us.
Vishal Mehta 16:48
Of course, there's always this very uncomfortable piece, like... we're... that I'm uncomfortable about is that "well, we are here to help!"
Steve Cinderby 16:58
... not the method that we've used, it's much more participatory, and engaging.
Vishal Mehta 17:01
Even despite this, you know, trying to do bottom-up kind of work, there's always a tension. For example, one of our research was to do a standard survey on... what was it, Steve... the standard international WHO survey that your friend at Virginia... Professor? What was that survey about?
Steve Cinderby 17:20
... oh, yeah.... Which? The "subjective wellbeing" one? Or the...
Vishal Mehta 17:23
Yeah! I mean, there was a question this survey had, but it's a standard question. Okay... so, from the research side, in this space, it is not surprising. But even when I heard it, and when the locals heard it... there's this mockingbird trying to get in again.... It's seems like it is seeing its own reflection and... puzzled. So... basically, there's this question... "Do you think that the Earth is a spaceship?"... is the question... something like that. So, you know, our Africa local partners were like, "What is this question?" And... then they were like... I was like... "Okay, what is this question!" I mean, I'm from India. And I'm also a scientist. But if I read the question is jarring, right? Maybe it's meant to be, because, you know, the whole idea of standardisation is that you have one question, really. And that way, you can compare across time and space, like different places at different times longitudinally. So there's always that kind of tension. If that was the.... if all the questions and everything we did was on that line, I don't think it would have been worked out.
Steve Cinderby 18:36
Yeah, and I mean, I think particularly around some of these topics, there's a real local context and culture and differences between places and understandings, which links to that colonialization of research question. So we found that in our work in the... some of the wellbeing questions that we asked in the Global North, just there were no words for those things in Swahili. So... for the same word, you know... that was the same... a different word in English would translate to the same word in Swahili. So the questions became redundant. And then, other PhD students are working on these sorts of topics in China. And she finding, well, firstly, that some of her participants are far less willing to look through a 20 question questionnaire around their wellbeing. So she's had to reduce the number of questions to a much more manageable subset. And again, some of them just don't really translate so well into the sort of Chinese context and the Chinese experience. So I think this sort of idea, there's some universal questions we can ask around this topic is probably flawed. But that's not what the scientists or the psychologist wants to hear. So...
Vishal Mehta 19:55
Yes, I mean, that goes back to feedback, right. I mean, what you just described Steve, just like cities have all kinds of feedback between human and environmental interaction, there needs to be feedback between the scientists and the communities that acknowledge the diversity that we have on the ground to make these efforts more meaningful and effective... in non-English speaking spaces, I don't mean, generally. So without that, I think we are not... we are not actually practising what we are preaching, in a sense. It's like... we also have to feedback and change and change fast, because everything else is changing so quickly. So there needs to be an inbuilt mechanism for this. And also, you know, we've talked about how we work very closely with local communities, civic organisations, regular residents. Can we talk a little bit more about the role of the governments in this? And are there any sectors that perhaps we could improve or strengthen relationships with in the future, especially say, the corporate sector perhaps, because, you know, the rapid growth is being implemented and driven by, to a large part, by real estate developers? And... so, you know, how do we fold that sector? I've always thought that, perhaps, we don't have a strong enough connection there.
Steve Cinderby 21:37
Yeah, I think that's a good insight, Vishal, in that, I think that's one of the big challenges, particularly in these secondary cities, is often they've got Planning Officers, offices and planning agencies within the local government. But often, the plans lag behind, actually, the reality of what's happening on the ground, particularly with the rise of informal settlements, and informality, you know, lands being changed and occupied in... regardless of what the city authorities planned for that site. And that then leads to the need to sort of address the rise of informal settlements and people living in those places in terms of delivering services and infrastructure to support them. So, yeah, I think that issue of the real estate, if you like, or how land is being developed, and the business or drivers behind that is something that's really critical in these places. And it's not been a key focus of the Initiative. But I agree, it's... in other projects we've worked on... in getting businesses engaged, and making them see that there's some sort of either business benefit, or that they have some business responsibility, through their actions, is a critical thing, I think in terms of influencing the future direction, both for cities or wherever else we've been working. So, yeah, I think maybe if we were doing this again, or into the future, if we do continue in these places, I think switching to having that kind of business engagement and more business focus, could be a really good way of actually having impact in these places that is more long lasting.
Vishal Mehta 23:27
Right, I was thinking of, you know, CSR, regulations in various countries, ESG framework, 'Environment, Society and Governance' frameworks, Corporate Social Responsibility, those are some avenues we should more intentionally explore in the future. It's coming up in a big way in the US, there's some resistance in some states, but it's finally getting to the US as well.
Steve Cinderby 23:51
Yeah...
Vishal Mehta 23:52
What about... yeah, go ahead, Steve...
Steve Cinderby 23:54
Yeah...and I think it is... is finding those entry points for business that either make some kind of financial sense for them or... or some responsibility they have, from an administrative point of view? Yeah. I think otherwise, in other projects where I've tried to engage with business unless you can hook them in some dimension of those, it's really hard to get them to engage because, you know, obviously, the bottom line is they're there to make profit or to employ people and manufacture things or do things. Some of these are seen as sort of a nice to have perhaps, but not necessarily critical for the business. So, finding out what makes it critical for the business side or the business mentality, I think is a challenge for research like this, but something we could work on into the future.
Vishal Mehta 24:43
And going back to government, you know, there's local government, state, national and the local government piece in our work, I've always found, there's tremendous interest and capacity to engage while we are there, and... but how they can actually take it on as part of their day-to-day work or planning has been a bit of a fuzzy area in my mind over almost two decades of working on cities in some way or the other is it's never clear as to how, in these types of cities, we're talking about secondary cities in... in LMIC countries? How how can that enter the sort of their ways of doing things? I think it's a longer game in the sense, there's a massive capacity building effort that needs to happen, that probably needs to be driven at the national level, and which varies in each country.
Steve Cinderby 25:48
I kind of agree. I think, I think some of its not necessarily at the national level, I think it's also at that... that local level of firstly, recognising particularly, say, in the smaller cities, the value of participation from residents in these processes, both in terms of monitoring the way the city is changing, perhaps using citizen science or some... or other methods of... like, using low cost sensors. But also getting that engagement from residents and actually determining the way the city's evolved. So I think, I think that mindset from secondary cities of the value of participation and the approaches they can use to actually bring that into their decision making, which I don't think necessarily needs national... national strategy for it, it can be from the bottom up at the local level or from the city authority. And then I think in terms of the approaches we've used, I think, also is the potential of these low cost sensors that are emerging. So they might not meet kind of statutory requirements of say, monitoring air pollution. But in terms of having a better understanding of the quality of the environment and the way environments are changing, I think low cost sensors can be really valuable, particularly for these smaller cities that might not have resources to put in an extensive official monitoring network.
Vishal Mehta 27:23
That's great. I thought we'd move on to discussing some of the main findings. There are many components and activities that we've engaged in. And... we... in future episodes, we're going to dig into some of these specific topics like Citizen Science, on one of our next episodes. But I thought that it'd be good to get a flavour of the findings across the different activities that we engaged in.
Steve Cinderby 28:02
Yeah, so we've we spent a lot of time trying to understand how the form of the city, the kind of land use there are there and the way people interact with it, are affecting their health and well being. And in terms of key findings, I think one of the things that was partly a driver for the initiative to begin with, was trying to understand how these different land uses affect people. And one of the key things has been the actual benefits that green spaces and green infrastructure in these cities are bringing even in these low middle income country settings. So we have understanding now about the social benefits of that from how people are using these spaces. But also much more quantitative work of actually, physiologically how these kinds of spaces can benefit people. So I think that it's quite a novel, new piece of information, really, and a lot of the research on this topic in the past has been from Europe and North America, but not so much in the kinds of cities we've been working in. And as I said, the pressures that the cities are under mean that these kinds of open spaces, green spaces or social interaction spaces are often the ones that are under most development pressure, and potentially have been the least valued in some ways. So, understanding the benefits those are bringing, for the people that live there, I think can be really important in terms of the choices city planners make and decision makers make. So, I think that's been one of the most... for me, partly because my interests are really interesting, critical findings. And I think we've done some really novel work in that area that is even opening some new avenues for research into the future.
Vishal Mehta 30:00
And, also, I was particularly thinking of our participatory mapping mapping activities in these cities. One that stands out, after two or three years, even as the mapping of the use of green spaces in these two cities, and, also, in different neighbourhoods, mapping of the different concerns, we had environmental champions from the communities, walking and mapping different areas of concern in terms of water and waste, air quality. One of the findings that were really interesting is that, you know, green spaces are assumed to be sort of the holy grail of, you know, green infrastructure, green building, and design. But the... it's not so... it's not so black and white... green is not as black and white as we've seen, because different parts of the community in different neighbourhoods for various reasons, like safety for women, in particular, make these places not universally, places of comfort and peace and well being.
Steve Cinderby 31:17
Yeah...
Vishal Mehta 31:18
The related... go ahead... yeah, Steve.
Steve Cinderby 31:21
Yeah, no, I totally agree. I mean, I think, as I said, in Europe and North America, now, there's increasingly strong evidence that the benefits green spaces have for our mental health and well being. And there could be quite a naive translation of that thinking of low middle income countries as being the equivalent or the same. Whereas, as you said, what we found is much more useful, I think, or emerging pattern that there's key differences in these low middle income countries and in different cultures and climates. Physical climate. So in Nakuru, Kenya, case study, we did find that for those people that do spend some time in the green spaces of the city, we can see a measurable uplift in their mental well being through spending that time, even if they're residents of some of the informal settlements, which to me is quite surprising that if you're, you assume if you were living in a stressful low income community, we wouldn't necessarily see that benefit from greenspace use, but we do see it in the data that we've collected. But as you said, the challenge in somewhere like Nakuru is two things really, one is, there are some parks that are green for some of the year. But they're not green universally, and into the future with climate change impacts. I don't think we're proposing that they should be irrigated to maintain our sort of ecosystem that in the northern latitudes would be something we'd expect to see. So I think there's an issue of what kinds of spaces can promote well being, and also the equity that I mentioned that you've touched upon, might mean that it's more important to say, disperse vegetation around the city, not in luxury parks or big parks, but say, putting street trees in so that people have an exposure to green infrastructure during their daily commute. And also the some of the other benefits that green space brings of say, shading, and thermal comfort, all those kinds of other benefits that green infrastructure give. And then if we move across to Udon Thani, and the Thai case study, exactly like you said, some of our measurements shows that the green parks are the ones that give the best physiological wellbeing benefit from the measurements we've taken. But when we subjectively ask people their preferences, they actually feel more comfortable, if you like, subjectively, in the more sociable spaces of the city. So some of those can be the kinds of retail environments where there is... ...yeah, shopping malls, where there's a green infrastructure component, you know, there's trees or planting, but there's also people and social interaction. So, again, that's slightly different from the sort of evidence and advice we give in in the UK of go and spend some time in green space, from the Thai culture is more important, perhaps to have a sociable space. So as I say, it's really interesting differences. And, again, more questions that in the future, we might want to go i nto more depth.
Vishal Mehta 34:10
Malls... Yeah that...
Steve Cinderby 34:45
And then...
Vishal Mehta 34:45
...yeah... go ahead...
Steve Cinderby 34:48
In terms of that mapping activity, as you said, I think I'm a geographer and I love making maps. Though we've done a whole range of mapping activities, we try to understand the uses people were making of different spaces for things like exercise, socialising, and relaxing, but also the spaces they found difficult or challenging. So try and map those across different neighbourhoods of the city. So that we could understand from somebody who lives in informal settlements, their view, and somebody might live in a slightly wealthier part of the city, what they their use of the space was. So that kind of participatory mapping. And then we've also, as you said, done with the citizen science method, a lot of what people collected had a spatial dimension. So they were collecting photographs of the challenges they experienced, but also the location of those photographs, so that we could map it. And that mapping was really useful, I think, in communicating those concerns to decision makers. So they could actually understand not just what the issue was, but more precisely where exactly the difficulty or challenge was being experienced, which really helped them in terms of addressing those things. So mapping has been as critical kind of focus on methods that we've used.
Vishal Mehta 35:31
And what you just said about mapping. You know, I think that in primary cities with much more capacity and resources, one can easily imagine or more easily imagine that this kind of activity could be taken up by the municipality, by the city itself, once it's proven to be useful for the everyday operations, right. I do wonder how it might differ for secondary cities where we work. I think that with local organisations developing this further into, say, an enterprise solution, they could partner with local government, or the government could have build the capacity to do it in-house, which I think would really help in the operational part of things. Yeah, I think there's there's probably two ways it could go in terms of that. One is, like you said, NGOs or other local organisations taking this up, as the methods and the approaches are increasingly easy to utilise. And the other that's more traditional is, most of these places have some kind of academic institution in them, often with a sort of geography component and collaborating with them as well to give this support, I think is the way that secondary cities could utilise some of these methods if they haven't got in-house capacity in the local authority. I want to shift gears to the past two years of the pandemic, and much of our work was, you know, boots on the ground. A diverse team from what I think four countries got together. And a lot of the work was fieldwork. Of course, that could not happen for two years. So I thought we could share with the audience what we were able to do, how we were able to keep the initiative going. You know, I can start us off with you know, we managed to put together a really fantastic virtual workshop on water especially related to fluorosis which is brought about by excess fluoride in groundwater. Now, this affects much of the world. In certain types of crystalline rocks, it's naturally occurring. You know, we... we have talked about air pollution driven by human activity, and change. But there are other risks that we have as human society, which are just natural like say arsenic in Bangladesh in the groundwater naturally occurring... geogenic. Same thing with excess fluoride in water, which impacts the skeletal system and other has other health impacts. So we managed to put together this workshop based on collecting this data in Nakuru in our African case study with local partners, fieldwork beforehand that kind of showcased with their own public health department's data, just how much of an issue this was. And then we brought together an international team and brought about connections with Indian doctors at Ramaiah Hospital in Bengaluru in India who have extensive experience on this. So that's one example of how we managed to use... you know, virtual methods of still engaging and being useful and moving the Initiative's work along. What else can you share, Steve, about how we managed to be productive on this front in the pandemic?
Steve Cinderby 39:53
Yeah, I mean, I think the example you just shared does show the value of SEI in terms of the sort of networks got both with academics but also practitioners in different countries. And that was really valuable in the pandemic that we could pivot towards this virtual engagement. And connecting people that, maybe, didn't speak before, around different topics. So the water issue of fluorosis is a really good example of that. And we did... we did try and move to that virtual engagement with particularly the local authorities to try and maintain some momentum under the pandemic condition in... in the two cities. It's quite challenging, as a way of continuing to do active kind of on the ground research, particularly with some of the local community groups that we were trying to engage extensively with. So informal settlements, often haven't got the infrastructure to do virtual engagement, which made it very hard to maintain those kinds of relationships. But, you know, I think the fact that we've been on the ground for two years prior to the pandemic, was a life saver for us, really, and that we had built some of those relationships. And then we could try to maintain some kind of active... activities on the ground through this virtual engagement and phone calls and contact that way. Yeah, I think for... for the kinds of work we've been doing, I mean, the pandemic was particularly problematic, because we were so dependent on actually doing things on the ground with real people in real places. But I think it also... pivoting it to a different dimension around the pandemic, I think, the benefits or the value of some of the data that we'd already collected about the uses people were making of spaces and the benefits those kinds of spaces could give them for their mental health and well being. I think, understanding, especially under the pandemic conditions, the increased value those spaces of social spaces and green spaces could have to maintain people's mental health was a valuable bit of learning. And we did actually try and do a piece of work early on in the lockdowns across the globe, to try and understand how different cities were responding, and what kinds of spaces people were able to access, and what benefits those spaces were giving. And globally, green spaces and public realm spaces that allowed people socially distanced to interact still with each other, were was hugely valuable in that health crisis. And again, I think that's giving us some evidence that, although they might not be as valued as some other parts of cities, it's something that I think we do need to increase the priority of maintaining or expanding those places to make these kinds of environments resilient to different challenges they might face in the future.
Vishal Mehta 43:12
I think we are coming towards the end of the episode maybe. What do you see as the next steps, you know? How about sharing what's left to do with this Initiative? And what are the other urban challenges and geographies that you and us at SEI hope to work on?
Steve Cinderby 43:39
Yeah, so I mean, Initiative, as we said, is in its final, final phase. So in terms of what we've got left to do with, we've been spending a lot of effort, feeding back all the information and the findings that we've collected from the two places to all the people that have participated, but also the local authorities. So that they can embed it into their, their databases and their understanding, and hopefully use it into the future. We've also been trying to package up the kinds of methods and approaches we've used into a form that we can then share it with lots of other places, as we've talked about, we've worked intensively in these two places, but a lot of the learning and the methods that we've generated, I think are applicable in lots of different urban environments. So we've been putting together resources that either local authorities or local... local community groups might be able to use around the world and packaging those in what we're calling an 'Urban Toolbox'. So that's a big focus for this phase of collecting all that together in a usable form. And then the other push that we've got is now that we have all this rich understanding, is to share that with other agencies. So things like the World Health Organisation or other urban-related research groups, so that we can share what we've learned and build upon that in their research areas. So I think for the Initiative, those are the key things. More broadly, like you said, I think the the Initiative's given the Institute lots of benefits in terms of some of the approaches and methods we've trialled and evaluated. So in a different complementary project, we've been using lots of kind of measurement monitoring approaches that we've used but this time in Kenya, in Mombasa and Nairobi, to look how moving around those two cities are affecting people's health and well being. So we've used some of the mapping approaches that we talked about. We've also been then been using the actual monitoring approaches using low cost sensors to understand the exposure of people to things that might be damaging their health, and also how the spaces are affecting them physiologically and all the subjective questions about how they perceive those spaces. So we're already translating the approaches and methods to other places and other cities, again, to hopefully improve the decision making or the outcomes in those spaces to improve people's health and well being.
Vishal Mehta 46:19
Excellent, Steve. Well, that's all we have time for on this our first episode. SEI is an international nonprofit that works in several countries at the intersection of science development and policy. You can find out more at www.sei.org.
Gokul Chakravarthy 46:39
In our next episode, we will be going deeper into some of the topics that were only touched upon in this one. Until then, be well.