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An evolutionary complex systems perspective on urban health
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An evolutionary complex systems perspective on urban health Jieling Liu a, b, 1, *, Franz W. Gatzweiler c, Manasi Kumar d, e a
Institute of Social Sciences - University of Lisbon, Lisbon, 1600-189, Portugal Ostrom Workshop - Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, 47408, USA c Institute of Urban Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xiamen, China d Department of Psychiatry, University of Nairobi, Kenya e Affiliate Research Fellow, University College London, UK b
A R T I C L E I N F O
A B S T R A C T
Keywords: Urban health Complex systems Ultrasociality Evolution Human-scale People-centered
Deliberations about how to govern complex problems of urban health and wellbeing sustainably have often been implicitly biased by ideas such as being ‘human-scale’ or ‘people-centered.’ With increasing urban populations and increasing urban system interconnectivity, many cities have transformed into city regions or clusters, and the external effects of urban growth are carried mainly by the marginalized and the environment putting urban health increasingly at risk. Here we address the question of why human societies have not been better at collectively adapting to the challenges of urbanization and global environmental change? We build a theoretical framework of multi-level selection, complex systems evolution, and governance, following which we then pre sent ‘human-scale’ and ‘people-centered’ ideas of urban development as expressions of two types of sociopolitical organization with different degrees of self-organization. We found several reasons for which the mal adies of current urban development emerged and the seeming inability to resolve them. First, urban systems became increasingly interconnected and evolved into ultrasocial superorganisms, displaying preference to sus tain themselves as a whole rather than their subordinates. Second, the difference in scaling effects between the biological and the social network contributed to the mismatch between rapid urban growth and slow adaptation. Furthermore, institutions of decreased variety reinforce themselves and become dominant, creating a positive feedback mechanism and promoting invasive and exploitative exponential growth, but they also reduce the creativity and resilience of urban systems. We also found that both the “human-scale” and the “people-centered” approaches acknowledge the exponential growth and decreasing variety in urban systems, and advocate for correcting the mismatches. To incorporate people’s needs and values for long-term, truly sustainable urban health governance, we recommend combining the self-organizing, evolutionary feature of “human-scale” and the coordinative, political feature of “people-centeredness.”
1. Introduction From an evolutionary complex systems perspective, we associate ‘human-scale’ and ‘people-oriented’ ideas of urban development with two different forms of socio-political organization with different degrees of self-organization at different scales in complex systems. Decentralized democracies primarily promote the former, while centralized de mocracies like China typically apply the latter. Both forms of organi zation abide by the evolutionary mechanisms of cooperation and competition for space and resources and the laws of thermodynamics but follow different rules of the game. Multi-level and group selection
theory is at the heart of understanding urban development [[1],2]. Instead of seeking ‘either state or market’ solutions to the problems of urban health, “the complexity approach (…) has the potential to make the historical framing of politics [‘left’ and ‘right’; pro-government intervention or pro-market solutions] obsolete” [3]: 416) and “the evolutionary complex systems perspective leads to policy recommen dations that cut across current political ideologies” [4]). The history of agriculture and urbanization is a history of changing flows of resources and energy at different levels of complexity to secure survival. With the rise of agriculture, humans started to capture and redirect more energy from the sun for their own needs, by cultivating
* Corresponding author. Institute of Social Sciences - University of Lisbon, Lisbon, 1600-189, Portugal E-mail address: [email protected] (J. Liu). 1 Full postal address: 513 North Park Avenue, Bloomington, IN 47408-3895 USA. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.seps.2020.100815 Received 1 September 2019; Received in revised form 29 January 2020; Accepted 20 February 2020 Available online 22 February 2020 0038-0121/© 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Please cite this article as: Jieling Liu, Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.seps.2020.100815
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and domesticating specific crops and animals [5]. In that process, cities and new specialized professions evolved, social complexity increased, and patterns of interconnectivity changed, hence they required new forms of coordination. The speed of resource flows and interactions also increased. To meet the challenges of increasingly complex social orga nizations, institutions transformed from repetitive actions that proved to be useful, like habits, routines, and other spontaneous behavioral order, to sophisticated, complex multi-layered institutional networks in specialized sectors of society, like the legal system. This organization of increasing complexity became necessary to meet the needs of a growing number of interconnected human agents and to facilitate the exponen tially increasing number of interactions, exchanges and flows of energy, data, and resources among them [6,7]. One of the remarkable features of systems with increasing complexity is that at some point, they seem to develop traits -referred to as a “self.” The neurobiological explanation of consciousness as the “self” coming to mind is a result of changing patterns of inter connectivity at higher-order in neural networks [8]. Furthermore, with regards to social organization [9],: Chapter V) wrote, “The village or township is the only association which is so perfectly natural that wherever a number of men are collected, it seems to constitute itself.” As we take an evolutionary perspective, we portrait the “self” as a social construct resulting from the observation and experience that systems behave as if they have an identity of their own. Scholarly understanding of cities as complex systems [10] and the “self” is that of a system with higher organizational complexity, measured by its degree of inter connectivity, with feedback links to its components, which are of lower complexity and that functions to pass on information by utilizing genes or memes. While genes are passed on through the multiplication of organized biological systems, the organization of social institutions, like religion, traditions, or know-how, facilitated an even more efficient passing on of information by memes – cultural units of information [11]; Chap. 11). It seems that, based on the memes, institutions, grammar, and syntax proposed by Crawford and Ostrom (2000), it is possible to build a coherent evolutionary theory for the social sciences. In this paper, we first present a theoretical framework of complex systems evolution, governance, and institutional homeostasis. Then, the two primary ideas of urban development: “human scale” and “peoplecentered” are analyzed. We argue that health problems in cities today have emerged from a failure to match organizational capacity with increasing degrees of interconnectivity in socially and technologically increasingly complex systems [12]. This asymmetry of social, techno logical, and ecological complexity leads to adverse health outcomes for people and the environment, and it leads to unsustainable cities. The challenge to adjust the asymmetries is in part due to people being overwhelmed by the task of governing complexity but also due to the enabling and inhibiting impacts on behavior from higher organizational levels, leading to denial and apathy.
theoretical foundation for system governance [14]. Organizational models and these theories are critical to making sense of Governance, particularly regarding the disturbances or irregularities in a system or a network [15]. Coordination, action, and learning are the central ele ments, particularly in implementation modeling, in which the organi zational and pragmatic aspects of systems governance are emphasized [14]. Coordination is a common approach to governance. In the field of New Public Management, coordination, together with direction, and control, of wholly or partially autonomous individuals or organizations on behalf of interests to which they jointly contribute, are achieved through governance [16]. In the structure-centric type of governance, the activity of coordinating communications is critical for achieving collective goals through collaboration [17]. In social and political sci ences, the structures and processes of coordination between public and private actors making and implementing binding policy decisions ac cording to their interdependent needs and interests compose the whole of governance [18]. In complex system governance, coordination is an approach to improve the performance of a complex system. Together with other approaches such as purposeful design, execution, and evo lution of essential metasystem functions, interactions may be stimulated between constituent entities within the system and between the system and external entities, thereby controlling or avoiding unnecessary in stabilities [19]. Self-organization or self-governance is another approach commonly referred to in complex systems governance. In cyber-physical systems, self-organization implies that the structural configuration and resultant performance of a system are left to evolve without constraint [19]. In social and political science, self-governance refers to the capacity of social entities to provide the necessary means to develop and maintain their own identity, thus govern themselves autonomously [13]. Self-governance is not merely deregulation or privatization. Kooiman [13] refers self-governance of systems to the biological concept of autopoiesis (literally self-production), mimicking the process of ‘living systems.’ He also refers to self-governance as a process of actors oper ating in their constellations, which features an actor-oriented approach. Kooiman proposes by himself that self-governance is a mode of gov erning societal interactions, and emphasizes that a clear picture of the diversity, dynamics, and complexity of a field or sector is critical for the effectiveness of self-governance. 3. The systemic nature of urban health problems The history of urbanization starts with the transition from huntergatherers to sedentary forms of live, early settlements, and eventually cities. Agriculture enabled people to gain control over resource flows, produce and store surplus, and thereby improve chances of survival. A warming climate contributed to making new areas of land cultivatable and inhabitable. That development, however, reached a threshold when humans start to fear the consequences of their dominance over the natural environment. Environmental degradation and pollution even tually eroded the ecological support functions required for healthy living in cities. Before facing health problems of global or planetary dimensions, people were always confronted with health problems in cities, famously in medieval cities, which suffered diseases in epidemic
2. Conceptual reflections Resource coordination and organizational capacity of complex sys tems are themes of a broader dominion - governance. Kooiman [13] defines governance as the totality of theoretical conceptions on govern ing, which can be considered as the totality of interactions public and private actors participate, to solve societal problems, to attend to the institutions which govern the interactions, and to establish a normative foundation for all those activities. The Natural Resource Governance Institute defines governance as “the form of political regime or how authority is exercised in the management of a country’s social or eco nomic resources for the public good. The term can also refer to the ca pacity of governments to design, formulate, and implement policies and discharge functions.” Organizational capacity is a critical condition that determines the performance of Governance. Organizational science forms the bases of complexity theory and systems theory; together, they form the 2
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proportions [20]. Interestingly some of those medieval diseases, such as the plague, are now returning. 2015, the World Health Organization recorded 320 cases, including 77 deaths [21]. Social systems, like markets, which were initially built on the bases of informal rules of exchange, have evolved into a sophisticated system of global capitalism [4]) and now seem to dictate and manipulate human behavior. Neoliberal ideas led to a situation in which the market system “tell(s) people how to live rather than people setting up markets to help them live the way (they) want to live.” [22]. As we will argue, this perception of a system “dictating” the behavior of the individuals can be explained by the so-called ‘downward causation’ in multilevel selection theory2 and the evolution of human ultrasociety.3 [23]:138) explain that in the transition to ultrasociety, “…groups of individuals become economically organized to function as a superorganism. (…) human society began to function like a single organism dedicated to the purpose of producing an economic surplus.” Crucial to our explanation of how and why humans are struggling with the negative urban health consequences of urban growth is an understanding of the cooperation and competition of complex systems at different scales of organization. As it is an evolutionary process, it is, by definition, not driven by a purpose or intention. Instead, it is a process in which different systems and subsystems cooperate, compete, and grow to fill spaces in the systemic state space4 - a view that is supported by multi-level selection theory [24]. Selection takes place at multiple levels of society, between individuals in groups but also among groups. At the group level, the selection is determined by those group traits which are best adapted to their environment. Selection emerges from the combi nation of traits of the individuals and the coordination mechanisms within the group. These coordination mechanisms organize how in dividuals interact inside the group and with their environment. The group then thereby displays a character of its own [25]. [23]: 139) explain that “…group selection takes on a new force with the transition to agriculture,” and here we argue that with the transition to agriculture, we have witnessed one system (agriculture) outperforming another (hunter-gatherer) in the competition for resources and space. Therefore, problems of urban health and wellbeing, like inequality, pollution, and poverty can be explained by the rapid rise of ultrasociety and the subordination of individuals in the ultra-social system, which functions to sustain itself rather than improve the health and wellbeing of its subordinates. Superlinear scaling effects in social networks, in combination with sublinear scaling effects in biological and infra structural networks [26], may also explain mismatches between rapid urban growth and slow infrastructural adaptation, including institu tional infrastructure. In other words, the urban socio-economic systems are growing faster than they can adapt to the environmental conse quences of their growth, thereby creating increasing risks to the health and wellbeing of its inhabitants. In the next section, we will look closer at the institutional and governance mismatches of that dynamic.
Fig. 1. Institutional homeostasis explains why mismatches occur between the 1. The capacity of institutions to avoid externalities and 2. Population growth and economic development producing larger ecological footprints (modified from Ref. [27].
4. Governance mismatches and institutional homeostasis The idea of institutional homeostasis (simplified in Fig. 1) explains how and why institutions create around value in the process of evolu tionary, organizational change as population densities change, social organization emerges, and natural environments are transformed at different scales and speeds [27]. Quadrant A: When population densities are low, and their ecological footprint is also low, there is little or no need for institutions to formally regulate the integration of externalities produced by society because ecosystems can absorb waste and recycle it. As population densities (Quadrant B) increase, social interactions and potential for conflict also increase, and so makes the ecological footprint of societies. However, because it takes time for institutions to adapt to the new socio-ecological realities and integrate the externalities created by the larger society, there is an institutional mismatch between the institutional capacity to integrate externalities and the production of externalities. Moving from Quadrant B to C, institutions become more sophisticated and eventually develop the capacity to integrate more external effects from population and socio-economic growth. The institutional mismatch in quadrant D describes a scenario after a collapse of societies that have exhausted the resources of their natural environments. As compared to Quadrant B, in which institutions had not yet adapted to increasing population pressures, here institutions are still in place, although the ecosystem functions have already declined or collapsed. The evolution of institutions is manifestations of homeostatic im pulses for living systems: Institutions constitute the systems that pass on memes, which are coded information of human social behavior. They aim at avoiding extreme behavior, which could cause social imbalances and endanger the viability of individuals or the group, and reversely, at providing incentives for ‘good’ behavior. Damasio (2010: 293–5) calls this socio-cultural homeostasis. Positive feedback mechanisms that attract others to join the system and contribute to its growth and stability (Fig. 1, Quadrant A to B), eventually also destabilize the system, when variety is reduced (Fig. 1, Quadrant C to D). A reduction of variety in the growth process can lead to a decrease in innovation, creativity, and system resilience [28]. Positive feedbacks (“more begets more”) is the cause of exponential
2 “First, higher-level entities such as social groups can evolve into adaptive units, but only by process of higher-level selection. For example, an altruistic behavior that benefits others at the expense of the self is selectively disad vantageous within groups. However, if many groups in the total population vary in the frequency of altruists, the most altruistic groups will differentially contribute to the total gene pool. Between-group selection favors altruism and can counteract within-group selection if it is sufficiently strong, causing the altruistic trait to evolve in the total population. This way of conceptualizing evolution is called multilevel selection (MLS) theory” [46]: 6). 3 “Ultrasociality refers to the most social of animal organizations, with a fulltime division of labor, specialists who gather no food but are fed by others, effective sharing of information about sources of food and danger, selfsacrificial effort in collective defense. This level has been achieved by ants, termites, and humans in several scattered archaic city–states.” [47]. Wilson refers to ultrasociality as eusociality (2005). 4 In discrete dynamical systems theory, a state space is the set of all possible configurations a system can take.
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growth [29]. They occur because of the persistence of strong in terrelationships and tend to be invasive, exploitative, dominate over negative feedback mechanisms that tend to curb them and to reduce variety. If the system does not innovate, it will inevitably collapse due to the lack of negative feedback and adaptation mechanisms, creating the entropy needed for other systems to emerge. An example can be drawn from the current economic growth model and its contribution to climate change. At an expert meeting presented by Lisbon University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences on climate change and health in October 2018 [30]: Economic growth and the globalization of goods and capital flows led to an unsustainable level in the consumption of natural resources, steady increase in pollution and climate change. On the one hand, the market economic system attracts fossil-fueled industries to thrive, converting primary resources into products and services, diversifying the economic system. On the other hand, environmental externalities, e.g., air pollution, deforestation, ecological degradation, biodiversity loss, and global warming, destabi lize the economic system by jeopardizing human health and security. The latter drives institutions to integrate social-economic consequences with environmental externalities (at least partially), which drives further growth intending to regain human health.
processes. Problems occur when people are disconnected from or have diffi culty to access the resource flows they need or when they do not share the values that urban physical infrastructures represent due to the matter of scale. The different ways to realize values through social networks are at the heart of both the “human-scale” and the “peoplecentered” types of urbanization [37] famously defined human-scale as ‘small and beautiful,’ although physical size is not a necessary criterion for the human-scale. In Max-Neef’s view (1991:8), a human-scale development is “focused and based on the satisfaction of fundamental human needs, on the generation of growing levels of self-reliance, and the construction of organic articulations of people with nature and technology, of global processes with local activity, of the personal with the social, of planning with autonomy and of civil society with the state.” Therefore, physical size is not a criterion for human-scale development, but what matters is the delivery of human values through the network. Any fundamental human need that is not adequately satisfied generates a pathology for human-scale development. For example, large infrastructure projects, like a bridge connecting two cities on opposite sides of a river, or a tunnel, built by the government, are large, yet human-scale as long as their structure and function are connected to what humans want, desire or value. The human scale can be significant, but it needs to be con nected to what people value and connect to through a web of social, institutional, technological, and biological networks, channeling re sources to and creating value from the project. The challenge lies in the situations that, what people value at one stage of development (e.g., growth) can be counterproductive at a later stage, and even if it does not become counterproductive, scaling up actions which were initially effective in responding to smaller population groups’ needs could be challenging. The concept of people-centered development has been discussed since the 1980s concerning the type of development that facilitates the transition to a new civilisation, a sharp contrast with the Euro-American modernization. In the latter, wealth is augmented by ever-increasing exploitation of the Earth, governed by an impersonal system and pos sesses higher legitimate power than people [38,39]. The concept was endorsed by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) as an approach in public policies and development strategies for sustainable development as early as in 1995 [40]. The World Health Organization [41] refers people-centeredness to the types of health care approaches that “consciously adopts the perspectives of in dividuals, families, and communities, and sees them as participants as well as beneficiaries of trusted health systems that respond to their needs and pref erences in humane and holistic ways.” [42]; p.10–11). According to WHO, people-centered health services need to reflect a set of core principles such as comprehensiveness in responding to the evolving health needs and aspirations of people and populations, equity, sustainability, pre vention, empowerment, systems-thinking, and many more. Fig. 2 pre sents a conceptual framework of people-centered health services defined by WHO. A key feature of people-centeredness, as WHO emphasizes in health services, is seeking to provide “the right care at the right time in the right place” aligning with available human and financial resources [42]: 14). For this reason, providing people-centered health care is a concern for both rich countries where health institutions and care delivery mecha nisms have built up over time and less developed regions, as the right to health is a fundamental human right that encompasses not just social and economical, but also cultural and environmental dimensions. For instance, for low-income African countries, there are ongoing problems of physical access to public services, shortages of health workers, and weak supply chains, with poor responsiveness of care and high depen dence on external funding. For middle-income countries often under going rapid societal change, such as China, often, people-centered health care tends to face the challenge of minimizing the difference in access to services between affluent and less affluent regions and between permanent urban residents and migrant workers. Finally, for
5. Human-scale and people-centeredness in the urban context Historically, the advantages of living in cities had turned into dis advantages when population growth outpaced the organizational ca pacity of cities, leading to public inclusion failure to enhance the common good. Since the 1940s, modern urban environments were built for cars driving at 50–60 km/h, instead of being built for people walking at 3–5 km/h. The slow-paced period of thousands of years of coadaptation between humans and their natural environment changed during the great acceleration of high-speed technology, mobility and infrastructure development, the rise of the city, and urban and expo nential population growth in the age of the Anthropocene [31]. Because of the speed of development, the process of evolutionary co-adaptation changed and became increasingly challenging organizationally, pro ducing what we can observe as so-called externalities: various forms of environmental pollution in ecosystems and poverty in social systems – the consequences of maladaptation in the process of socio-ecological evolution. Those are the areas outside of the sustainability corridor in Fig. 1, when institutional and environmental change happens at different paces of change. When mismatches occur in the pace and scale of social organization, they appear in the form of social and environmental externalities, shifting the costs to the outside of ‘the system.’ Globalization created extensive infrastructure and housing projects in cities in which people have specialized functions in a global network of exchange. The disconnection between infrastructure related to global resource and financial flows and local urban territory is particularly visible in global urban financial centers. Global networks of exchange gradually detach from the local urban territory. Cities have increasingly been defined as investment vehicles instead of shared living spaces [32]. Urban public spaces are increasingly changed into private spaces for investments responsive to global flows of finance detached from the local needs of urban residents. “There is no possibility for the active participation of people in gigantic systems which are hierarchically organized and where decisions flow from the top down to the bottom” [33]: 198). We refer to “human-scale” [33,34] and “people-oriented” [35], the two main types of sustainable urban development. They represent two different kinds of self-organization [36] - the “human-scale” develop ment is more of an economic reference in nature, while the “people- centered” development carries a more political connotation. They are both human-made, and both aim at improving the health and wellbeing of people. These two types of urban development are distinctive as they realize different ideas and degrees of political self-organization, approach differently in decision- and rulemaking, and implementation 4
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Fig. 2. Conceptual framework for people-centered and integrated health services. Figure source: [42].
We used human-scale and people-centered as two different categories of self-organization applied in two different types of urban development and planning. In summary, the dynamics of the system listed below are at work, and they seem to explain the increasing health and wellbeing risks and relative lack of actions in cities:
high-income countries where the primary challenges to service access have been addressed, improving people-centeredness is about facili tating access to health care for marginalized or socially excluded pop ulations. Different country contexts also mean that each has its own health profile. Rich countries tend to attribute high morbidity and mortality rates to chronic and non-communicable diseases. In middle-income countries, health care infrastructure and quality are in concern due to the rapidly rising rate of chronic as well as non-communicable diseases, and health in low-income countries is often jeopardized by poor physical environments, weak supervision, low pay and limited accountability to local communities. Therefore, people-centeredness does not have one single model or one single set of standards and should not be treated as a new “magic sword” for resolving the mounting urban health problems even when exacerbated by climate change. Instead, it should be considered as an overarching service design principle that respects people’s rights and takes into ac count the local context, values, and preferences in decision-making across the governance, financing, and resources management. To sum up, the principle of people-centeredness, as elaborated in the development context, means “putting people into the centre.” It focuses on meeting the needs and interests of people in development, climate actions, and urban health depending on their socio-economic, cultural and environmental contexts and values with a vision of individuals, families, communities, and practitioners participating in policyforming, therefore reducing transaction costs in the increasingly com plex and uncertain urban system in the long run. Equally, the humanscale emphasizes not the physical size but the value of people in asso ciation with their natural and cultural surroundings, or the web of institutional infrastructure. The two principles share the commonality of not being one single, predefined set of standards, but rather, relative and highly dependent on the people in specific contexts. The difference of the two lies in that, human-scale manifests deep logical roots from evolutionary, complex systems, and economic perspectives; the princi ple of people-centeredness carries a much more political and social notion rooted in the constant debate and reflection of the Western modernization, which, from an anthological perspective is also referred to as the Anthropocene.
� The systems which people developed to sustain their livelihoods became increasingly interconnected and evolved into ultrasocial superorganisms that seem to display behavior of their own. Ultra society rose rapidly and tends to sustain itself rather than to improve the health and wellbeing of its individual subordinates. � Social networks, including institutions and technology, have super linear scaling effects, while biological and infrastructural networks have sublinear scaling effects. Therefore, mismatches emerged be tween rapid urban growth and slow infrastructural adaptation. � Institutions of decreased variety reinforce themselves and become dominant, creating a positive feedback mechanism, promoting exponential growth, which is invasive and exploitative. However, the reduction of variety in the urban economic growth process also leads to a decrease in innovation, creativity, and system resilience. Exponential growth will eventually collapse if innovation does not occur to create negative feedback and adaptation mechanisms such as increasing the diversity in the social networks to counteract with the positive feedback mechanism. � Besides, from an evolutionary perspective, marginalization, detach ment, or anomie happens as a result of the grand acceleration and lacking time for co-adaptation between the biological network and the social network. Both human-scale and people-centered approaches for urban devel opment recognize the increasing interconnectedness as well as the mismatches of the social and the biological networks, which means acknowledging the exponential growth (the self-reinforcing positive feedback mechanism) and decreasing variety in the system. Both ap proaches also advocate for correcting the mismatches (creating negative feedback and adaptation mechanisms) by reintroducing people’s values, needs, and preferences adequate in the specific problem and political contexts. The notion of “human-scale” is politically more neutral than “people-centered,” focuses on human needs and values rather than the physical dimension of size, and emphasizes optimal resource efficiency from evolutionary, complex systems, and economic perspectives. The notion of “people-centeredness” is politically more explicit as it argues for contrasting the approaches used in Western modernization, focuses on aligning resources with those who are in need “at the right time and
6. Conclusions: an evolutionary complex systems perspective for urban and human wellbeing An evolutionary complex systems perspective on cities provides a new understanding of the kind of health and wellbeing problems we are facing in cities worldwide, beyond normative and ideological categories. 5
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place.” Each approach has its strengths in addressing the complex health and wellbeing issues. However, one is not necessarily better than the other. The “human-scale” urban development approach allows more room for the cities to evolve as complex adaptive systems and communities to self-organize and does not necessarily require a system controller. However, it is uncertain to which direction and how long it will take to create the negative feedback and adaptation mechanisms needed to curb the exploitative exponential growth and to internalize environmental and social externalities. Hence, the “human-scale” approach is relatively weak when it comes to how fast and how much we can improve the health and wellbeing problems in cities. The “people-centered” approach emphasizes coordination, which ascertains the direction, time, and degree of interventions in the dynamics of the system. However, it requires a coordinator who has the right to distribute resources to those in need, and those who have the right or power to distribute resources are always a small group. Hence, the “people-centered” approach is also relatively insufficient regarding how many people it can represent and centralize truly for their health and wellbeing. Throughout most of human history, small groups of people were the most natural social units for self-regulation. They can govern themselves and participate in governance at a larger scale [43–45]. Large-scale governance cannot be achieved simply from the physical scale-up of small-scale governance. Instead, it needs to be multi-cellular or poly centric. In such societies, individuals’ participation is an essential in termediate level. Besides, when the complexity of human-nature interaction increases, a certain degree of coordination is required to ensure that the self-reinforcing positive feedback mechanisms (such as invasive, exploitative exponential growth) do not bring these complex social-ecological systems too close to collapse. Accordingly, we provide some recommendations for long-term, so cially, and environmentally more sustainable urban governance:
Funding This work was directly supported by the Chinese Academy of Sci ences (CAS) in the form of conference participation funding, and was indirectly supported by the Portuguese National Foundation of Science and Technology (FCT) in the form of a Ph.D. scholarship which the first author Jieling Liu had received during the preparation period of this manuscript. The scholarship grant number is PD/BD/128209/2016. Declaration of competing interest We declare no competing interests in the submission of this manu script, financially or non-financially. References [1] Næss P, Vogel N. Sustainable urban development and the multi-level transition perspective. Environ Innovat Soc Trans 2012;4:36–50. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. eist.2012.07.001. September 2012. [2] Weaver R. Evolutionary theory and neighborhood quality: a multilevel selectioninspired approach to studying urban property conditions. Appl Res Qual Life 2016; 11:369–86. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11482-014-9328-0. [3] Beinhocker ED. The origin of wealth. Evolution, complexity and the radical remaking of economics, vol. 526. London: Random House Business Books; 2007, ISBN 0712676619. [4] Gowdy J, Wilson DS. Human ultrasociality and the invisible hand: foundational developments in evolutionary science alter a foundational concept in economics. J Bioecon 2015;17:37–52. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10818-014-9192-x. [5] Christian D. Big history: the big bang, life on Earth, and the rise of humanity. Chantilly, Virginia: The Great Courses; 2008, ISBN 159803409X. [6] Jones GT. Sustainability, complexity, and the negotiation of constraint. Art. 3. Tulsa Law Rev 2008;44(1):29–50. Available at: http://digitalcommons.law.utulsa. edu/tlr/vol44/iss1/3. [7] Foxon TJ, Barker T, K€ ohler J, Michie J, Oughton C. Towards a new complexity economics for sustainability: insights from a series of research seminars. University of Leeds; 2010. December 2010. Report on seminars supported by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), 2008-2010. Available at: http://www.see.leed s.ac.uk/fileadmin/Documents/research/sri/Complexity_Economics_for_Sustainab ility_report_December_01.pdf. [8] Damasio A. Self comes to mind: constructing the conscious brain. New York: Pantheon Books; 2010, 0307378756. 384. [9] De Tocqueville A. Chapter V: necessity of examining the condition of the states. In: Mayer JP, editor. Democracy in America. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books; 1835. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/de-tocqueville/de mocracy-america/ch05.htm. [10] Bai X, Surveyer A, Elmqvist T, Gatzweiler FW, Güneralp B, Parnell S, PrieurRichard A-H, Shrivastava P, Siri JS, Stafford-Smith M, Toussaint J-P, Webb R. Defining and advancing a systems approach for sustainable cities. Curr Opin Environ Sustain 2016;23:69–78. https://doi.org/10.1016/j/cosust.2016.11.010. [11] Dawkins R. The selfish gene. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press; 1989, 0192860925. 368. [12] Gatzweiler FW, Reis S, Zhang Y, Jayasinghe S. Lessons from complexity science for urban health and well-being. Cities Health 2017;1(2):210–23. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/23748834.2018.1448551. [13] Kooiman J. Governing as governance. London: SAGE Publications Ltd; 2003. ISBN: O 7619 4036 7 (pbk). Library of Congress Control Number 2002104221. [14] Calida BY. System governance Analysis of complex systems. Ph.D. United States – Virginia: Old Dominion University; 2013. [15] Nicolescu L. Governance in higher education: theories and practices applied in metallurgical industry. Metal Int 2010;15:201–5. [16] Lynn L, Heinrich C, Hill C. Studying governance and public management: challenges and prospects. J Publ Adm Res Theor 2000;10(2):233–61. [17] Willke H. Smart governance: governing the global knowledge society. Frankurt, Germany: Campus Verlag GmbH: The University of Chicago Press; 2007, ISBN 9783-593-38253-1. [18] Krahmann E. Conceptualizing security governance, Cooperation and Conflict. J Nord Int Stud Assoc 2003;38(1):5–26. Copyright ©2003 Sage Publications, www.sa gepublications.com. 0010-8367[200303]38:1;5–26;031297. [19] Katina PF, Keating CB, Gheorghe AV, Masera M. Complex system governance for critical cyber-physical systems. Int J Crit Infrastruct 2017;13(2–3). https://doi.org/ 10.1504/IJCIS.2017.088230. published online 1 December 2017. [20] Ciecieznski NJ. The stench of disease: public health and the environment in latemedieval English towns and cities. J Health Cult Soc 2013;4:91–104. https://doi. org/10.5195/hcs.2013.114. [21] Bichell RE. The Plague is back, this time in New Mexico. Accessed Mar 5, 2019, https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/06/29/534863486/the-bubon ic-plague-is-back-this-time-in-new-mexico; 2017. [22] Norgaard R. Economics, religion and the climate crisis. A long view. In: Presentation at Portland state University, feb 1; 2017. Accessed at, https://www. pdx.edu/sites/www.pdx.edu.econ/files/R_NorgaardPPT_IEE_Feb1_2017.pdf. Feb 26, 2019.
1. The high complexity of interacting causes and effects in urban health and wellbeing problems needs to be recognized more comprehensively. 2. Innovation needs to be allowed and substantially encouraged to boost the diversity, creativity, and resilience of cities facing multiple sustainability challenges. 3. More time should be allowed for the environmental condition, and the socio-economic conditions to co-adapt and diversity to grow, especially given the accelerated dynamics people are living in due to decreased variety. 4. Enable and include people – individuals, families, communities, and other non-government groups to participate in urban health and climate governance and co-create the institutions which take into account people’s needs and values. 5. These recommendations above require a certain degree of coordi nation, but not dominating, to meet the demand of creating inno vative adaptation solutions efficiently to urban health and wellbeing problems. Submission This manuscript was initially prepared for the 6th Workshop on the Ostrom Workshop (WOW6) conference at Indiana University Bloo mington, June 19–22, 2019. It has been modified for this submission. Copyright remains owned by authors. Authors’ contribution All the authors have contributed to developing this manuscript and agreed to have it submitted to Socio-Economic Planning Sciences.
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Socio-Economic Planning Sciences xxx (xxxx) xxx Jieling Liu is PhD candidate in the interdisciplinary Program in Climate Change and Sustainable Development Policies, a joint initiative between the University of Lisbon, New Univer sity of Lisbon and University of East Anglia. She is also a visiting scholar to the Ostrom Workshop on Political Theory and Institutional Analysis at Indiana University Bloomington. Jieling has an academic background in Political Sciences and Journalism. Prior to joining the PhD Program, she worked as journalist and Managing Editor for the Qingdao-based publi cation agency REDSTAR Works, where she was responsible for producing three English-Chinese bilingual magazines - RED STAR, Qingdao Family & Shandong Education Guide, covering topics of contemporary cultural, educational, socio-economic and environmental affairs. Jieling’s thesis examines the plan ning and governance of urban green spaces as common-pool resources for climate change adaptation and health under Ecological Civilisation, in the context of rapid socio-economic urban development in China, with specific case studies drawn from Guangzhou. Her thesis is supported by the interdisci plinary science program ‘Urban Health and Wellbeing: a Sys tems Approach’ hosted by CAS-IUE, is supervised by Prof. Dr. Franz Gatzweiler, ecological economist and Executive Director of the program and co-supervised by Dr. Olivia Bina, geogra pher and Principal Researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon. Jieling’s collaborator at the Ostrom Workshop is professor Burnell Fischer.
[23] Gowdy J, Krall L. The ultrasocial origin of the Anthropocene. Ecol Econ 2013;95: 137–47. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2013.08.006. [24] Wilson DS, Wilson EO. Rethinking the theoretical foundations of sociobiology. Q Rev Biol 2007;82:327–48. [25] Wilson DS, Ostrom E, Cox M. Generalizing the core design principles for the efficacy of groups. J Econ Behav Organ 2013;S90:S21–32. [26] West G. Scale. The universal Laws of growth, innovation, sustainability, and the Pace of Life in organisms, cities, economies, and companies. New York: Penguin Press; 2017, ISBN 9781594205583. p. 496. [27] Gatzweiler FW. Reframing the value of nature: biological value and institutional homeostasis. Environ Val 2014;23(3):275–95. https://doi.org/10.3197/ 096327114X13947900181392. [28] Yamagata Y, Maruyama H, editors. Urban resilience: a transformative approach. New York, Berlin: Springer; 2016. [29] Bettencourt L, Lobo J, Helbing D, Kühnert C, West Geoffrey B. Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities. In: Proceedings of the national Academy of sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), vol. 104; 2007. p. 7301–6. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0610172104. 17. [30] Liu J, Gatzweiler F, Schmidt L. Addressing the nexus challenge of climate change, human health, and urban sustainability. 2019. ICS Estudos e Relat� orios. ISSN: 2183-6922. Available at: https://www.ics.ulisboa.pt/flipping/er2019_1/12/. [31] Ehlers E, Krafft Th, editors. Earth system science in the Anthropocene: emerging issues and problems. New York, Berlin: Springer; 2006. ISBN: 103540265880. [32] McDonald R, Bailly A. What investors want. A guide for cities. How should cities engage investors and developers? London. Centre for Cities; 2017. Available at: https://www.centreforcities.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/17-07-18-What-In vestors-Want-A-Guide-For-Cities.pdf. [33] Max-Neef M. Human scale development. Conception, application and further reflections. 114 pages. New York, London: Apex Press; 1991, 094525735X. [34] Gehl J. Cities for people. Washington, Covelo, London: Island Press; 2010, ISBN 9781597265737. p. 288. [35] Chen M, Gong Y, Lu D, Ye Ch. Build a people-oriented urbanization: China’s newtype urbanization dream and Anhui model. Land Use Pol 2019;80:1–9. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2018.09.031. [36] Colchester J. Systems and complexity. An Overview; 2016, ISBN 153013448X. [37] Schumacher EF. Small is beautiful: a study of economics as if people mattered, vol. 348. London: Blond & Briggs; 1973, 0061997765. [38] Korten DC, Klauss R. People-centered development: contributions toward theory and planning frameworks. Kumarian Press; 1984, 0931816319. [39] Robertson J. People-centered development: principles for a new civilization. Available at: https://davidkorten.org/07robert/; 1994 (visited on April 26, 2019). [40] United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (Undesa). Peoplecentered development requires better integration of economic, social policies. 2004. Third Committee Told, as It Begins Current Session. GA/SHC/3777. Available at: https://www.un.org/press/en/2004/gashc3777.doc.htm. April 26, 2019. [41] World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe. Towards people-centred health systems: an innovative approach for better health outcomes. Copenhagen. 2013. http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/186756/Towards-p eople-centred-health-systems-an-innovative-approach-for-better-health-outcomes. pdf. April 26, 2019. [42] World Health Organization, et al. WHO/HIS/SDS/2015.6 WHO global strategy on people-centred and integrated health services. 2015. [43] Ostrom E. Governing the commons: the Evolution of institutions for collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 1990. p. 298. 0521405998. [44] Bowles S, Gintis H. Social capital and community governance. Econ J 2002;112: F419–36. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0297.00077. [45] Ostrom E. Beyond markets and states: polycentric governance of complex economic systems. Am Econ Rev 2010;100:641–72. June 2010. [46] Wilson DS, Van Vugt M, O’Gorman R. Multilevel selection theory and major evolutionary transitions – implications for psychological science. Curr Dir Psychol Sci 2007;17(1):6–9. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20183239. [47] Campbell DT. Legal and primary-group social controls. In: Gruter M, Bohannan P, editors. Law, biology and culture: the evolution of law. Berkeley: Bepress; 1982, 091552063X. 59–171.
Prof. Dr. Franz W. Gatzweiler studied Agricultural Eco nomics at the University of Bonn and the Humboldt University of Berlin in Germany. His doctorate research (summa cum laude) was on the ‘Nature of Economic Value and the Value of Nature’. He received stipends and research grants from the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (AvH), the Volkswagen Foundation, the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research, the K€ athe-Hamburger Kolleg and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He was research fellow at the Workshop in Polit ical Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University, USA established by the late Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom. 2015 he earned a habilitation (fakultas docendi) for independent teaching and research in the field of resource economics from the Humboldt University of Berlin. His research interests are in ecological and institutional economics of social and ecological systems and have covered problems of value in complex socioecological systems, institutional change, polycentric organiza tion, marginality and technology innovations for productivity growth in rural development as well as urban health and wellbeing. He was senior researcher at the Centre of Develop ment Research (ZEF), University of Bonn, Germany from 2004 to 2014. Currently he is full professor at the Institute of Urban Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences and executive di rector of the International Council for Science’s global pro gramme on “Urban Health and Wellbeing: a Systems Approach”.
Dr Manasi Kumar is a clinical psychologist and psychothera pist by training and currently works as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Nairobi in Kenya. Since 2011 she has been engaging in maternal and child mental health research in Nairobi, Kenya. Manasi has been collabo rating with the University of Washington Seattle and New York University Medical School on NIH/NIMH funding mechanisms and has mentored over 20 postgraduate students who are focusing on maternal depression and its impact of child health outcomes. She is also acting as a Co-PI on a project studying the outcome and effectiveness of psychotherapy delivered at KNH, Nairobi (2013-) funded by PRIME-K and also involved as a PI in neuropsychological evaluation of HIV þ children in Kenya with University of Grenada (2014-ongoing). Prior to this, Manasi worked on issues around psychological ramifications of poverty, trauma and disasters. She has worked on mental health issues in refugee child populations in Delhi (Vikram Sarabhai Foundation & University of Delhi), Dharamsala (with Tibetan Government in exile), London (with Anna Freud Centre, UCL), and with child survivors of Gujarat earthquake and riots (SEWA, Gujarat) and more recently with vulnerable child populations in Nairobi.
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Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Socio-Economic Planning Sciences journal homepage: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/seps
An evolutionary complex systems perspective on urban health Jieling Liu a, b, 1, *, Franz W. Gatzweiler c, Manasi Kumar d, e a
Institute of Social Sciences - University of Lisbon, Lisbon, 1600-189, Portugal Ostrom Workshop - Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, 47408, USA c Institute of Urban Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xiamen, China d Department of Psychiatry, University of Nairobi, Kenya e Affiliate Research Fellow, University College London, UK b
A R T I C L E I N F O
A B S T R A C T
Keywords: Urban health Complex systems Ultrasociality Evolution Human-scale People-centered
Deliberations about how to govern complex problems of urban health and wellbeing sustainably have often been implicitly biased by ideas such as being ‘human-scale’ or ‘people-centered.’ With increasing urban populations and increasing urban system interconnectivity, many cities have transformed into city regions or clusters, and the external effects of urban growth are carried mainly by the marginalized and the environment putting urban health increasingly at risk. Here we address the question of why human societies have not been better at collectively adapting to the challenges of urbanization and global environmental change? We build a theoretical framework of multi-level selection, complex systems evolution, and governance, following which we then pre sent ‘human-scale’ and ‘people-centered’ ideas of urban development as expressions of two types of sociopolitical organization with different degrees of self-organization. We found several reasons for which the mal adies of current urban development emerged and the seeming inability to resolve them. First, urban systems became increasingly interconnected and evolved into ultrasocial superorganisms, displaying preference to sus tain themselves as a whole rather than their subordinates. Second, the difference in scaling effects between the biological and the social network contributed to the mismatch between rapid urban growth and slow adaptation. Furthermore, institutions of decreased variety reinforce themselves and become dominant, creating a positive feedback mechanism and promoting invasive and exploitative exponential growth, but they also reduce the creativity and resilience of urban systems. We also found that both the “human-scale” and the “people-centered” approaches acknowledge the exponential growth and decreasing variety in urban systems, and advocate for correcting the mismatches. To incorporate people’s needs and values for long-term, truly sustainable urban health governance, we recommend combining the self-organizing, evolutionary feature of “human-scale” and the coordinative, political feature of “people-centeredness.”
1. Introduction From an evolutionary complex systems perspective, we associate ‘human-scale’ and ‘people-oriented’ ideas of urban development with two different forms of socio-political organization with different degrees of self-organization at different scales in complex systems. Decentralized democracies primarily promote the former, while centralized de mocracies like China typically apply the latter. Both forms of organi zation abide by the evolutionary mechanisms of cooperation and competition for space and resources and the laws of thermodynamics but follow different rules of the game. Multi-level and group selection
theory is at the heart of understanding urban development [[1],2]. Instead of seeking ‘either state or market’ solutions to the problems of urban health, “the complexity approach (…) has the potential to make the historical framing of politics [‘left’ and ‘right’; pro-government intervention or pro-market solutions] obsolete” [3]: 416) and “the evolutionary complex systems perspective leads to policy recommen dations that cut across current political ideologies” [4]). The history of agriculture and urbanization is a history of changing flows of resources and energy at different levels of complexity to secure survival. With the rise of agriculture, humans started to capture and redirect more energy from the sun for their own needs, by cultivating
* Corresponding author. Institute of Social Sciences - University of Lisbon, Lisbon, 1600-189, Portugal E-mail address: [email protected] (J. Liu). 1 Full postal address: 513 North Park Avenue, Bloomington, IN 47408-3895 USA. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.seps.2020.100815 Received 1 September 2019; Received in revised form 29 January 2020; Accepted 20 February 2020 Available online 22 February 2020 0038-0121/© 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Please cite this article as: Jieling Liu, Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.seps.2020.100815
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and domesticating specific crops and animals [5]. In that process, cities and new specialized professions evolved, social complexity increased, and patterns of interconnectivity changed, hence they required new forms of coordination. The speed of resource flows and interactions also increased. To meet the challenges of increasingly complex social orga nizations, institutions transformed from repetitive actions that proved to be useful, like habits, routines, and other spontaneous behavioral order, to sophisticated, complex multi-layered institutional networks in specialized sectors of society, like the legal system. This organization of increasing complexity became necessary to meet the needs of a growing number of interconnected human agents and to facilitate the exponen tially increasing number of interactions, exchanges and flows of energy, data, and resources among them [6,7]. One of the remarkable features of systems with increasing complexity is that at some point, they seem to develop traits -referred to as a “self.” The neurobiological explanation of consciousness as the “self” coming to mind is a result of changing patterns of inter connectivity at higher-order in neural networks [8]. Furthermore, with regards to social organization [9],: Chapter V) wrote, “The village or township is the only association which is so perfectly natural that wherever a number of men are collected, it seems to constitute itself.” As we take an evolutionary perspective, we portrait the “self” as a social construct resulting from the observation and experience that systems behave as if they have an identity of their own. Scholarly understanding of cities as complex systems [10] and the “self” is that of a system with higher organizational complexity, measured by its degree of inter connectivity, with feedback links to its components, which are of lower complexity and that functions to pass on information by utilizing genes or memes. While genes are passed on through the multiplication of organized biological systems, the organization of social institutions, like religion, traditions, or know-how, facilitated an even more efficient passing on of information by memes – cultural units of information [11]; Chap. 11). It seems that, based on the memes, institutions, grammar, and syntax proposed by Crawford and Ostrom (2000), it is possible to build a coherent evolutionary theory for the social sciences. In this paper, we first present a theoretical framework of complex systems evolution, governance, and institutional homeostasis. Then, the two primary ideas of urban development: “human scale” and “peoplecentered” are analyzed. We argue that health problems in cities today have emerged from a failure to match organizational capacity with increasing degrees of interconnectivity in socially and technologically increasingly complex systems [12]. This asymmetry of social, techno logical, and ecological complexity leads to adverse health outcomes for people and the environment, and it leads to unsustainable cities. The challenge to adjust the asymmetries is in part due to people being overwhelmed by the task of governing complexity but also due to the enabling and inhibiting impacts on behavior from higher organizational levels, leading to denial and apathy.
theoretical foundation for system governance [14]. Organizational models and these theories are critical to making sense of Governance, particularly regarding the disturbances or irregularities in a system or a network [15]. Coordination, action, and learning are the central ele ments, particularly in implementation modeling, in which the organi zational and pragmatic aspects of systems governance are emphasized [14]. Coordination is a common approach to governance. In the field of New Public Management, coordination, together with direction, and control, of wholly or partially autonomous individuals or organizations on behalf of interests to which they jointly contribute, are achieved through governance [16]. In the structure-centric type of governance, the activity of coordinating communications is critical for achieving collective goals through collaboration [17]. In social and political sci ences, the structures and processes of coordination between public and private actors making and implementing binding policy decisions ac cording to their interdependent needs and interests compose the whole of governance [18]. In complex system governance, coordination is an approach to improve the performance of a complex system. Together with other approaches such as purposeful design, execution, and evo lution of essential metasystem functions, interactions may be stimulated between constituent entities within the system and between the system and external entities, thereby controlling or avoiding unnecessary in stabilities [19]. Self-organization or self-governance is another approach commonly referred to in complex systems governance. In cyber-physical systems, self-organization implies that the structural configuration and resultant performance of a system are left to evolve without constraint [19]. In social and political science, self-governance refers to the capacity of social entities to provide the necessary means to develop and maintain their own identity, thus govern themselves autonomously [13]. Self-governance is not merely deregulation or privatization. Kooiman [13] refers self-governance of systems to the biological concept of autopoiesis (literally self-production), mimicking the process of ‘living systems.’ He also refers to self-governance as a process of actors oper ating in their constellations, which features an actor-oriented approach. Kooiman proposes by himself that self-governance is a mode of gov erning societal interactions, and emphasizes that a clear picture of the diversity, dynamics, and complexity of a field or sector is critical for the effectiveness of self-governance. 3. The systemic nature of urban health problems The history of urbanization starts with the transition from huntergatherers to sedentary forms of live, early settlements, and eventually cities. Agriculture enabled people to gain control over resource flows, produce and store surplus, and thereby improve chances of survival. A warming climate contributed to making new areas of land cultivatable and inhabitable. That development, however, reached a threshold when humans start to fear the consequences of their dominance over the natural environment. Environmental degradation and pollution even tually eroded the ecological support functions required for healthy living in cities. Before facing health problems of global or planetary dimensions, people were always confronted with health problems in cities, famously in medieval cities, which suffered diseases in epidemic
2. Conceptual reflections Resource coordination and organizational capacity of complex sys tems are themes of a broader dominion - governance. Kooiman [13] defines governance as the totality of theoretical conceptions on govern ing, which can be considered as the totality of interactions public and private actors participate, to solve societal problems, to attend to the institutions which govern the interactions, and to establish a normative foundation for all those activities. The Natural Resource Governance Institute defines governance as “the form of political regime or how authority is exercised in the management of a country’s social or eco nomic resources for the public good. The term can also refer to the ca pacity of governments to design, formulate, and implement policies and discharge functions.” Organizational capacity is a critical condition that determines the performance of Governance. Organizational science forms the bases of complexity theory and systems theory; together, they form the 2
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proportions [20]. Interestingly some of those medieval diseases, such as the plague, are now returning. 2015, the World Health Organization recorded 320 cases, including 77 deaths [21]. Social systems, like markets, which were initially built on the bases of informal rules of exchange, have evolved into a sophisticated system of global capitalism [4]) and now seem to dictate and manipulate human behavior. Neoliberal ideas led to a situation in which the market system “tell(s) people how to live rather than people setting up markets to help them live the way (they) want to live.” [22]. As we will argue, this perception of a system “dictating” the behavior of the individuals can be explained by the so-called ‘downward causation’ in multilevel selection theory2 and the evolution of human ultrasociety.3 [23]:138) explain that in the transition to ultrasociety, “…groups of individuals become economically organized to function as a superorganism. (…) human society began to function like a single organism dedicated to the purpose of producing an economic surplus.” Crucial to our explanation of how and why humans are struggling with the negative urban health consequences of urban growth is an understanding of the cooperation and competition of complex systems at different scales of organization. As it is an evolutionary process, it is, by definition, not driven by a purpose or intention. Instead, it is a process in which different systems and subsystems cooperate, compete, and grow to fill spaces in the systemic state space4 - a view that is supported by multi-level selection theory [24]. Selection takes place at multiple levels of society, between individuals in groups but also among groups. At the group level, the selection is determined by those group traits which are best adapted to their environment. Selection emerges from the combi nation of traits of the individuals and the coordination mechanisms within the group. These coordination mechanisms organize how in dividuals interact inside the group and with their environment. The group then thereby displays a character of its own [25]. [23]: 139) explain that “…group selection takes on a new force with the transition to agriculture,” and here we argue that with the transition to agriculture, we have witnessed one system (agriculture) outperforming another (hunter-gatherer) in the competition for resources and space. Therefore, problems of urban health and wellbeing, like inequality, pollution, and poverty can be explained by the rapid rise of ultrasociety and the subordination of individuals in the ultra-social system, which functions to sustain itself rather than improve the health and wellbeing of its subordinates. Superlinear scaling effects in social networks, in combination with sublinear scaling effects in biological and infra structural networks [26], may also explain mismatches between rapid urban growth and slow infrastructural adaptation, including institu tional infrastructure. In other words, the urban socio-economic systems are growing faster than they can adapt to the environmental conse quences of their growth, thereby creating increasing risks to the health and wellbeing of its inhabitants. In the next section, we will look closer at the institutional and governance mismatches of that dynamic.
Fig. 1. Institutional homeostasis explains why mismatches occur between the 1. The capacity of institutions to avoid externalities and 2. Population growth and economic development producing larger ecological footprints (modified from Ref. [27].
4. Governance mismatches and institutional homeostasis The idea of institutional homeostasis (simplified in Fig. 1) explains how and why institutions create around value in the process of evolu tionary, organizational change as population densities change, social organization emerges, and natural environments are transformed at different scales and speeds [27]. Quadrant A: When population densities are low, and their ecological footprint is also low, there is little or no need for institutions to formally regulate the integration of externalities produced by society because ecosystems can absorb waste and recycle it. As population densities (Quadrant B) increase, social interactions and potential for conflict also increase, and so makes the ecological footprint of societies. However, because it takes time for institutions to adapt to the new socio-ecological realities and integrate the externalities created by the larger society, there is an institutional mismatch between the institutional capacity to integrate externalities and the production of externalities. Moving from Quadrant B to C, institutions become more sophisticated and eventually develop the capacity to integrate more external effects from population and socio-economic growth. The institutional mismatch in quadrant D describes a scenario after a collapse of societies that have exhausted the resources of their natural environments. As compared to Quadrant B, in which institutions had not yet adapted to increasing population pressures, here institutions are still in place, although the ecosystem functions have already declined or collapsed. The evolution of institutions is manifestations of homeostatic im pulses for living systems: Institutions constitute the systems that pass on memes, which are coded information of human social behavior. They aim at avoiding extreme behavior, which could cause social imbalances and endanger the viability of individuals or the group, and reversely, at providing incentives for ‘good’ behavior. Damasio (2010: 293–5) calls this socio-cultural homeostasis. Positive feedback mechanisms that attract others to join the system and contribute to its growth and stability (Fig. 1, Quadrant A to B), eventually also destabilize the system, when variety is reduced (Fig. 1, Quadrant C to D). A reduction of variety in the growth process can lead to a decrease in innovation, creativity, and system resilience [28]. Positive feedbacks (“more begets more”) is the cause of exponential
2 “First, higher-level entities such as social groups can evolve into adaptive units, but only by process of higher-level selection. For example, an altruistic behavior that benefits others at the expense of the self is selectively disad vantageous within groups. However, if many groups in the total population vary in the frequency of altruists, the most altruistic groups will differentially contribute to the total gene pool. Between-group selection favors altruism and can counteract within-group selection if it is sufficiently strong, causing the altruistic trait to evolve in the total population. This way of conceptualizing evolution is called multilevel selection (MLS) theory” [46]: 6). 3 “Ultrasociality refers to the most social of animal organizations, with a fulltime division of labor, specialists who gather no food but are fed by others, effective sharing of information about sources of food and danger, selfsacrificial effort in collective defense. This level has been achieved by ants, termites, and humans in several scattered archaic city–states.” [47]. Wilson refers to ultrasociality as eusociality (2005). 4 In discrete dynamical systems theory, a state space is the set of all possible configurations a system can take.
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growth [29]. They occur because of the persistence of strong in terrelationships and tend to be invasive, exploitative, dominate over negative feedback mechanisms that tend to curb them and to reduce variety. If the system does not innovate, it will inevitably collapse due to the lack of negative feedback and adaptation mechanisms, creating the entropy needed for other systems to emerge. An example can be drawn from the current economic growth model and its contribution to climate change. At an expert meeting presented by Lisbon University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences on climate change and health in October 2018 [30]: Economic growth and the globalization of goods and capital flows led to an unsustainable level in the consumption of natural resources, steady increase in pollution and climate change. On the one hand, the market economic system attracts fossil-fueled industries to thrive, converting primary resources into products and services, diversifying the economic system. On the other hand, environmental externalities, e.g., air pollution, deforestation, ecological degradation, biodiversity loss, and global warming, destabi lize the economic system by jeopardizing human health and security. The latter drives institutions to integrate social-economic consequences with environmental externalities (at least partially), which drives further growth intending to regain human health.
processes. Problems occur when people are disconnected from or have diffi culty to access the resource flows they need or when they do not share the values that urban physical infrastructures represent due to the matter of scale. The different ways to realize values through social networks are at the heart of both the “human-scale” and the “peoplecentered” types of urbanization [37] famously defined human-scale as ‘small and beautiful,’ although physical size is not a necessary criterion for the human-scale. In Max-Neef’s view (1991:8), a human-scale development is “focused and based on the satisfaction of fundamental human needs, on the generation of growing levels of self-reliance, and the construction of organic articulations of people with nature and technology, of global processes with local activity, of the personal with the social, of planning with autonomy and of civil society with the state.” Therefore, physical size is not a criterion for human-scale development, but what matters is the delivery of human values through the network. Any fundamental human need that is not adequately satisfied generates a pathology for human-scale development. For example, large infrastructure projects, like a bridge connecting two cities on opposite sides of a river, or a tunnel, built by the government, are large, yet human-scale as long as their structure and function are connected to what humans want, desire or value. The human scale can be significant, but it needs to be con nected to what people value and connect to through a web of social, institutional, technological, and biological networks, channeling re sources to and creating value from the project. The challenge lies in the situations that, what people value at one stage of development (e.g., growth) can be counterproductive at a later stage, and even if it does not become counterproductive, scaling up actions which were initially effective in responding to smaller population groups’ needs could be challenging. The concept of people-centered development has been discussed since the 1980s concerning the type of development that facilitates the transition to a new civilisation, a sharp contrast with the Euro-American modernization. In the latter, wealth is augmented by ever-increasing exploitation of the Earth, governed by an impersonal system and pos sesses higher legitimate power than people [38,39]. The concept was endorsed by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) as an approach in public policies and development strategies for sustainable development as early as in 1995 [40]. The World Health Organization [41] refers people-centeredness to the types of health care approaches that “consciously adopts the perspectives of in dividuals, families, and communities, and sees them as participants as well as beneficiaries of trusted health systems that respond to their needs and pref erences in humane and holistic ways.” [42]; p.10–11). According to WHO, people-centered health services need to reflect a set of core principles such as comprehensiveness in responding to the evolving health needs and aspirations of people and populations, equity, sustainability, pre vention, empowerment, systems-thinking, and many more. Fig. 2 pre sents a conceptual framework of people-centered health services defined by WHO. A key feature of people-centeredness, as WHO emphasizes in health services, is seeking to provide “the right care at the right time in the right place” aligning with available human and financial resources [42]: 14). For this reason, providing people-centered health care is a concern for both rich countries where health institutions and care delivery mecha nisms have built up over time and less developed regions, as the right to health is a fundamental human right that encompasses not just social and economical, but also cultural and environmental dimensions. For instance, for low-income African countries, there are ongoing problems of physical access to public services, shortages of health workers, and weak supply chains, with poor responsiveness of care and high depen dence on external funding. For middle-income countries often under going rapid societal change, such as China, often, people-centered health care tends to face the challenge of minimizing the difference in access to services between affluent and less affluent regions and between permanent urban residents and migrant workers. Finally, for
5. Human-scale and people-centeredness in the urban context Historically, the advantages of living in cities had turned into dis advantages when population growth outpaced the organizational ca pacity of cities, leading to public inclusion failure to enhance the common good. Since the 1940s, modern urban environments were built for cars driving at 50–60 km/h, instead of being built for people walking at 3–5 km/h. The slow-paced period of thousands of years of coadaptation between humans and their natural environment changed during the great acceleration of high-speed technology, mobility and infrastructure development, the rise of the city, and urban and expo nential population growth in the age of the Anthropocene [31]. Because of the speed of development, the process of evolutionary co-adaptation changed and became increasingly challenging organizationally, pro ducing what we can observe as so-called externalities: various forms of environmental pollution in ecosystems and poverty in social systems – the consequences of maladaptation in the process of socio-ecological evolution. Those are the areas outside of the sustainability corridor in Fig. 1, when institutional and environmental change happens at different paces of change. When mismatches occur in the pace and scale of social organization, they appear in the form of social and environmental externalities, shifting the costs to the outside of ‘the system.’ Globalization created extensive infrastructure and housing projects in cities in which people have specialized functions in a global network of exchange. The disconnection between infrastructure related to global resource and financial flows and local urban territory is particularly visible in global urban financial centers. Global networks of exchange gradually detach from the local urban territory. Cities have increasingly been defined as investment vehicles instead of shared living spaces [32]. Urban public spaces are increasingly changed into private spaces for investments responsive to global flows of finance detached from the local needs of urban residents. “There is no possibility for the active participation of people in gigantic systems which are hierarchically organized and where decisions flow from the top down to the bottom” [33]: 198). We refer to “human-scale” [33,34] and “people-oriented” [35], the two main types of sustainable urban development. They represent two different kinds of self-organization [36] - the “human-scale” develop ment is more of an economic reference in nature, while the “people- centered” development carries a more political connotation. They are both human-made, and both aim at improving the health and wellbeing of people. These two types of urban development are distinctive as they realize different ideas and degrees of political self-organization, approach differently in decision- and rulemaking, and implementation 4
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Fig. 2. Conceptual framework for people-centered and integrated health services. Figure source: [42].
We used human-scale and people-centered as two different categories of self-organization applied in two different types of urban development and planning. In summary, the dynamics of the system listed below are at work, and they seem to explain the increasing health and wellbeing risks and relative lack of actions in cities:
high-income countries where the primary challenges to service access have been addressed, improving people-centeredness is about facili tating access to health care for marginalized or socially excluded pop ulations. Different country contexts also mean that each has its own health profile. Rich countries tend to attribute high morbidity and mortality rates to chronic and non-communicable diseases. In middle-income countries, health care infrastructure and quality are in concern due to the rapidly rising rate of chronic as well as non-communicable diseases, and health in low-income countries is often jeopardized by poor physical environments, weak supervision, low pay and limited accountability to local communities. Therefore, people-centeredness does not have one single model or one single set of standards and should not be treated as a new “magic sword” for resolving the mounting urban health problems even when exacerbated by climate change. Instead, it should be considered as an overarching service design principle that respects people’s rights and takes into ac count the local context, values, and preferences in decision-making across the governance, financing, and resources management. To sum up, the principle of people-centeredness, as elaborated in the development context, means “putting people into the centre.” It focuses on meeting the needs and interests of people in development, climate actions, and urban health depending on their socio-economic, cultural and environmental contexts and values with a vision of individuals, families, communities, and practitioners participating in policyforming, therefore reducing transaction costs in the increasingly com plex and uncertain urban system in the long run. Equally, the humanscale emphasizes not the physical size but the value of people in asso ciation with their natural and cultural surroundings, or the web of institutional infrastructure. The two principles share the commonality of not being one single, predefined set of standards, but rather, relative and highly dependent on the people in specific contexts. The difference of the two lies in that, human-scale manifests deep logical roots from evolutionary, complex systems, and economic perspectives; the princi ple of people-centeredness carries a much more political and social notion rooted in the constant debate and reflection of the Western modernization, which, from an anthological perspective is also referred to as the Anthropocene.
� The systems which people developed to sustain their livelihoods became increasingly interconnected and evolved into ultrasocial superorganisms that seem to display behavior of their own. Ultra society rose rapidly and tends to sustain itself rather than to improve the health and wellbeing of its individual subordinates. � Social networks, including institutions and technology, have super linear scaling effects, while biological and infrastructural networks have sublinear scaling effects. Therefore, mismatches emerged be tween rapid urban growth and slow infrastructural adaptation. � Institutions of decreased variety reinforce themselves and become dominant, creating a positive feedback mechanism, promoting exponential growth, which is invasive and exploitative. However, the reduction of variety in the urban economic growth process also leads to a decrease in innovation, creativity, and system resilience. Exponential growth will eventually collapse if innovation does not occur to create negative feedback and adaptation mechanisms such as increasing the diversity in the social networks to counteract with the positive feedback mechanism. � Besides, from an evolutionary perspective, marginalization, detach ment, or anomie happens as a result of the grand acceleration and lacking time for co-adaptation between the biological network and the social network. Both human-scale and people-centered approaches for urban devel opment recognize the increasing interconnectedness as well as the mismatches of the social and the biological networks, which means acknowledging the exponential growth (the self-reinforcing positive feedback mechanism) and decreasing variety in the system. Both ap proaches also advocate for correcting the mismatches (creating negative feedback and adaptation mechanisms) by reintroducing people’s values, needs, and preferences adequate in the specific problem and political contexts. The notion of “human-scale” is politically more neutral than “people-centered,” focuses on human needs and values rather than the physical dimension of size, and emphasizes optimal resource efficiency from evolutionary, complex systems, and economic perspectives. The notion of “people-centeredness” is politically more explicit as it argues for contrasting the approaches used in Western modernization, focuses on aligning resources with those who are in need “at the right time and
6. Conclusions: an evolutionary complex systems perspective for urban and human wellbeing An evolutionary complex systems perspective on cities provides a new understanding of the kind of health and wellbeing problems we are facing in cities worldwide, beyond normative and ideological categories. 5
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place.” Each approach has its strengths in addressing the complex health and wellbeing issues. However, one is not necessarily better than the other. The “human-scale” urban development approach allows more room for the cities to evolve as complex adaptive systems and communities to self-organize and does not necessarily require a system controller. However, it is uncertain to which direction and how long it will take to create the negative feedback and adaptation mechanisms needed to curb the exploitative exponential growth and to internalize environmental and social externalities. Hence, the “human-scale” approach is relatively weak when it comes to how fast and how much we can improve the health and wellbeing problems in cities. The “people-centered” approach emphasizes coordination, which ascertains the direction, time, and degree of interventions in the dynamics of the system. However, it requires a coordinator who has the right to distribute resources to those in need, and those who have the right or power to distribute resources are always a small group. Hence, the “people-centered” approach is also relatively insufficient regarding how many people it can represent and centralize truly for their health and wellbeing. Throughout most of human history, small groups of people were the most natural social units for self-regulation. They can govern themselves and participate in governance at a larger scale [43–45]. Large-scale governance cannot be achieved simply from the physical scale-up of small-scale governance. Instead, it needs to be multi-cellular or poly centric. In such societies, individuals’ participation is an essential in termediate level. Besides, when the complexity of human-nature interaction increases, a certain degree of coordination is required to ensure that the self-reinforcing positive feedback mechanisms (such as invasive, exploitative exponential growth) do not bring these complex social-ecological systems too close to collapse. Accordingly, we provide some recommendations for long-term, so cially, and environmentally more sustainable urban governance:
Funding This work was directly supported by the Chinese Academy of Sci ences (CAS) in the form of conference participation funding, and was indirectly supported by the Portuguese National Foundation of Science and Technology (FCT) in the form of a Ph.D. scholarship which the first author Jieling Liu had received during the preparation period of this manuscript. The scholarship grant number is PD/BD/128209/2016. Declaration of competing interest We declare no competing interests in the submission of this manu script, financially or non-financially. References [1] Næss P, Vogel N. Sustainable urban development and the multi-level transition perspective. Environ Innovat Soc Trans 2012;4:36–50. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. eist.2012.07.001. September 2012. [2] Weaver R. Evolutionary theory and neighborhood quality: a multilevel selectioninspired approach to studying urban property conditions. Appl Res Qual Life 2016; 11:369–86. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11482-014-9328-0. [3] Beinhocker ED. The origin of wealth. Evolution, complexity and the radical remaking of economics, vol. 526. London: Random House Business Books; 2007, ISBN 0712676619. [4] Gowdy J, Wilson DS. Human ultrasociality and the invisible hand: foundational developments in evolutionary science alter a foundational concept in economics. J Bioecon 2015;17:37–52. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10818-014-9192-x. [5] Christian D. Big history: the big bang, life on Earth, and the rise of humanity. Chantilly, Virginia: The Great Courses; 2008, ISBN 159803409X. [6] Jones GT. Sustainability, complexity, and the negotiation of constraint. Art. 3. Tulsa Law Rev 2008;44(1):29–50. Available at: http://digitalcommons.law.utulsa. edu/tlr/vol44/iss1/3. [7] Foxon TJ, Barker T, K€ ohler J, Michie J, Oughton C. Towards a new complexity economics for sustainability: insights from a series of research seminars. University of Leeds; 2010. December 2010. Report on seminars supported by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), 2008-2010. Available at: http://www.see.leed s.ac.uk/fileadmin/Documents/research/sri/Complexity_Economics_for_Sustainab ility_report_December_01.pdf. [8] Damasio A. Self comes to mind: constructing the conscious brain. New York: Pantheon Books; 2010, 0307378756. 384. [9] De Tocqueville A. Chapter V: necessity of examining the condition of the states. In: Mayer JP, editor. Democracy in America. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books; 1835. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/de-tocqueville/de mocracy-america/ch05.htm. [10] Bai X, Surveyer A, Elmqvist T, Gatzweiler FW, Güneralp B, Parnell S, PrieurRichard A-H, Shrivastava P, Siri JS, Stafford-Smith M, Toussaint J-P, Webb R. Defining and advancing a systems approach for sustainable cities. Curr Opin Environ Sustain 2016;23:69–78. https://doi.org/10.1016/j/cosust.2016.11.010. [11] Dawkins R. The selfish gene. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press; 1989, 0192860925. 368. [12] Gatzweiler FW, Reis S, Zhang Y, Jayasinghe S. Lessons from complexity science for urban health and well-being. Cities Health 2017;1(2):210–23. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/23748834.2018.1448551. [13] Kooiman J. Governing as governance. London: SAGE Publications Ltd; 2003. ISBN: O 7619 4036 7 (pbk). Library of Congress Control Number 2002104221. [14] Calida BY. System governance Analysis of complex systems. Ph.D. United States – Virginia: Old Dominion University; 2013. [15] Nicolescu L. Governance in higher education: theories and practices applied in metallurgical industry. Metal Int 2010;15:201–5. [16] Lynn L, Heinrich C, Hill C. Studying governance and public management: challenges and prospects. J Publ Adm Res Theor 2000;10(2):233–61. [17] Willke H. Smart governance: governing the global knowledge society. Frankurt, Germany: Campus Verlag GmbH: The University of Chicago Press; 2007, ISBN 9783-593-38253-1. [18] Krahmann E. Conceptualizing security governance, Cooperation and Conflict. J Nord Int Stud Assoc 2003;38(1):5–26. Copyright ©2003 Sage Publications, www.sa gepublications.com. 0010-8367[200303]38:1;5–26;031297. [19] Katina PF, Keating CB, Gheorghe AV, Masera M. Complex system governance for critical cyber-physical systems. Int J Crit Infrastruct 2017;13(2–3). https://doi.org/ 10.1504/IJCIS.2017.088230. published online 1 December 2017. [20] Ciecieznski NJ. The stench of disease: public health and the environment in latemedieval English towns and cities. J Health Cult Soc 2013;4:91–104. https://doi. org/10.5195/hcs.2013.114. [21] Bichell RE. The Plague is back, this time in New Mexico. Accessed Mar 5, 2019, https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/06/29/534863486/the-bubon ic-plague-is-back-this-time-in-new-mexico; 2017. [22] Norgaard R. Economics, religion and the climate crisis. A long view. In: Presentation at Portland state University, feb 1; 2017. Accessed at, https://www. pdx.edu/sites/www.pdx.edu.econ/files/R_NorgaardPPT_IEE_Feb1_2017.pdf. Feb 26, 2019.
1. The high complexity of interacting causes and effects in urban health and wellbeing problems needs to be recognized more comprehensively. 2. Innovation needs to be allowed and substantially encouraged to boost the diversity, creativity, and resilience of cities facing multiple sustainability challenges. 3. More time should be allowed for the environmental condition, and the socio-economic conditions to co-adapt and diversity to grow, especially given the accelerated dynamics people are living in due to decreased variety. 4. Enable and include people – individuals, families, communities, and other non-government groups to participate in urban health and climate governance and co-create the institutions which take into account people’s needs and values. 5. These recommendations above require a certain degree of coordi nation, but not dominating, to meet the demand of creating inno vative adaptation solutions efficiently to urban health and wellbeing problems. Submission This manuscript was initially prepared for the 6th Workshop on the Ostrom Workshop (WOW6) conference at Indiana University Bloo mington, June 19–22, 2019. It has been modified for this submission. Copyright remains owned by authors. Authors’ contribution All the authors have contributed to developing this manuscript and agreed to have it submitted to Socio-Economic Planning Sciences.
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Socio-Economic Planning Sciences xxx (xxxx) xxx Jieling Liu is PhD candidate in the interdisciplinary Program in Climate Change and Sustainable Development Policies, a joint initiative between the University of Lisbon, New Univer sity of Lisbon and University of East Anglia. She is also a visiting scholar to the Ostrom Workshop on Political Theory and Institutional Analysis at Indiana University Bloomington. Jieling has an academic background in Political Sciences and Journalism. Prior to joining the PhD Program, she worked as journalist and Managing Editor for the Qingdao-based publi cation agency REDSTAR Works, where she was responsible for producing three English-Chinese bilingual magazines - RED STAR, Qingdao Family & Shandong Education Guide, covering topics of contemporary cultural, educational, socio-economic and environmental affairs. Jieling’s thesis examines the plan ning and governance of urban green spaces as common-pool resources for climate change adaptation and health under Ecological Civilisation, in the context of rapid socio-economic urban development in China, with specific case studies drawn from Guangzhou. Her thesis is supported by the interdisci plinary science program ‘Urban Health and Wellbeing: a Sys tems Approach’ hosted by CAS-IUE, is supervised by Prof. Dr. Franz Gatzweiler, ecological economist and Executive Director of the program and co-supervised by Dr. Olivia Bina, geogra pher and Principal Researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon. Jieling’s collaborator at the Ostrom Workshop is professor Burnell Fischer.
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Prof. Dr. Franz W. Gatzweiler studied Agricultural Eco nomics at the University of Bonn and the Humboldt University of Berlin in Germany. His doctorate research (summa cum laude) was on the ‘Nature of Economic Value and the Value of Nature’. He received stipends and research grants from the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (AvH), the Volkswagen Foundation, the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research, the K€ athe-Hamburger Kolleg and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He was research fellow at the Workshop in Polit ical Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University, USA established by the late Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom. 2015 he earned a habilitation (fakultas docendi) for independent teaching and research in the field of resource economics from the Humboldt University of Berlin. His research interests are in ecological and institutional economics of social and ecological systems and have covered problems of value in complex socioecological systems, institutional change, polycentric organiza tion, marginality and technology innovations for productivity growth in rural development as well as urban health and wellbeing. He was senior researcher at the Centre of Develop ment Research (ZEF), University of Bonn, Germany from 2004 to 2014. Currently he is full professor at the Institute of Urban Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences and executive di rector of the International Council for Science’s global pro gramme on “Urban Health and Wellbeing: a Systems Approach”.
Dr Manasi Kumar is a clinical psychologist and psychothera pist by training and currently works as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Nairobi in Kenya. Since 2011 she has been engaging in maternal and child mental health research in Nairobi, Kenya. Manasi has been collabo rating with the University of Washington Seattle and New York University Medical School on NIH/NIMH funding mechanisms and has mentored over 20 postgraduate students who are focusing on maternal depression and its impact of child health outcomes. She is also acting as a Co-PI on a project studying the outcome and effectiveness of psychotherapy delivered at KNH, Nairobi (2013-) funded by PRIME-K and also involved as a PI in neuropsychological evaluation of HIV þ children in Kenya with University of Grenada (2014-ongoing). Prior to this, Manasi worked on issues around psychological ramifications of poverty, trauma and disasters. She has worked on mental health issues in refugee child populations in Delhi (Vikram Sarabhai Foundation & University of Delhi), Dharamsala (with Tibetan Government in exile), London (with Anna Freud Centre, UCL), and with child survivors of Gujarat earthquake and riots (SEWA, Gujarat) and more recently with vulnerable child populations in Nairobi.
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