Top view of real estate buildings and green space in modern city

Top view of real estate buildings and green space in modern city. Photo: Chun han / Getty Images .

As urbanization continues to surge, cities have become centres of opportunity for education, employment, and healthcare. However, their rapid expansion often leads to inadequate infrastructure and the degradation of ecological foundations, compromising residents’ well-being and the city’s sustainability. The SEI Initiative on City Health and Wellbeing has conducted extensive research to address these challenges and aims to discover how cities can become equitable, liveable, and enjoyable places for their inhabitants.

Join us in this new City Health and Well-being podcast series, where SEI scholars share their perspectives and insights on how we can create sustainable and participatory planning for urban environments. We explore the challenges and opportunities of urbanization, and how we can balance economic and business opportunities with people-centric, equitable, and sociable cities.

Hosted by Vishal Mehta, each episode features a different expert who provides in-depth analyses of complex topics and discusses how we can maximize the well-being of urban populations while minimizing resource consumption and without compromising the city’s resilience.

Tune in and be part of the conversation on how we can make cities healthier, happier, and more sustainable. The podcast is available on the following platforms:

Trailer – The City Health and Well-being Podcast

A city provides opportunities for education, jobs and health care, for example, but is that all there is to a good life? Can good health and well being coexist with economic and business opportunities that are also people-centric, liveable, equitable, sociable, and, maybe even, enjoyable? This is the central question that the folks at SEI (Stockholm Environment Institute), have been poring over. And this is exactly what this podcast called the City Health and Well-being podcast intends to understand and share with you. Vishal Mehta, a Senior Scientist at SEI, working in their Davis, California office, who has actually worked on the City Health and Well-being Initiative hosts the podcast, and Gokul Chakravarthy is its producer.

Trailer - The City Health and Well-being Podcast

Episode 1 – The City Health and Well-being Initiative

In the first episode of the City Health and Well-being podcast, the host Vishal Mehta is joined by Steve Cinderby from SEI’s York centre in the UK. Steve is one of the co-leads of this Initiative and introduces the Initiative, its purpose, methods, challenges and findings.

Episode 1 - The City Health and Well-being Initiative

Episode 2 – Citizen Science

SEI York’s citizen science research group has expertise in designing, running and evaluating citizen science projects on environmental sustainability topics.

In this episode, Vishal Mehta talks to his colleague, Rachel Pateman from SEI York about citizen science in general and its application in SEI’s City Health and Well-being Initiative.

Episode 2 - Citizen Science

Episode 3 – Urban Toolbox

In this, third episode, Vishal Mehta introduces one of the outputs of SEI’s City Health and Well-being Initiative, namely the Urban Toolbox for “liveable” cities. This Toolbox is a collection of digital tools that support the understanding of different dimensions of urban sustainability.

Vishal is joined by Diane Archer from SEI’s Asia office in Thailand and Rosie Witton from SEI’s Oxford centre in the UK.

The Urban Toolbox is available now on the the weADAPT platform .

Episode 3 - Urban Toolbox