Urbanization and health

A majority the world’s population (4.2 billion) are now living in cities and municipal regions. According to the UN, 55% of the world was living in cities in 2018 and over 68% were expected to live in urban areas by 2050. Urbanization is a dynamic and evolving physical, social, and economic transformation that shapes the health and well-being of populations living in cities and around the world. City living can be healthy, since they can offer more population groups the health benefits of life-supporting infrastructure such as clean water and sanitation, education, and social services, as well as greater cultural, religious, and political expression and freedoms. This chapter briefly reviews the historical debates around the connections between human health and urbanization and highlights some challenges for addressing twenty-first century urbanization. Twenty-first century urbanization presents new challenges for urban health.

Far East: how to stop the outflow of people and make it attractive? (Polemical reflections)

The article discusses issues related to the trend of population loss in the Far East, how it affects the economy and living standards of the population, assess measures to contain outflows, formulate tasks that can make the region attractive to investors, the population, and those who want to come here. Causal links between the region's economic specialization and social living conditions are assessed. Efforts to improve life without changing the structure of production do not produce the desired result. It is argued that a change in the economic model, the transition from export-raw materials to industrial development, can change the nature of demographic processes and migration sentiments. Changing the economic paradigm opens the possibility to form a need for absolute population growth, to move from the task of "savings" to the multiplication of the people. The most important components of the new model: integration ties with the Asia-Pacific region, involvement in these processes economic and scientific, and technological potential of Russia, setting priorities. These are activities aimed at the development of the oceans and Cosmos, and Culture, where the country retains credibility in the world community, can be most effectively implemented leadership positions. A critical assessment of the existing spatial organization of life and activities in the Far East is needed. It is proposed to discuss adjustments to the administrative-territorial division, reducing the number of subjects of the federation, uniting or re-reporting some of them. The role-playing functions of the largest cities in the Far East, their specialization, and cooperation are discussed. The national task is proposed to assess the possibilities of forming a World City in eastern Russia in the future. This approach changes the perception of the Far East as a colonial-raw suburb, positioning it at the forefront of interaction with dynamic economies, where the potential for professional growth is superior to other regions of the country and is the main condition for achieving a high standard of living.

Migrant Religious Groups

As a world city, Victorian London was a magnet for migrants, including Italians, Germans, French, and Greeks. The two most numerous migrant groups were Eastern European Jews and Irish Roman Catholics, whose arrival challenged and changed their small host communities. Both host communities had to respond to the material and spiritual needs of relatively large numbers of poor migrants whose numbers in limited localities and unknown languages and customs aroused a degree of hostility and fear that they would disadvantage existing poor communities in those districts. The leaders of both communities adopted somewhat similar strategies to prevent ‘leakage’ of members from their respective faith groups in the face of militant Protestant mission activity, and to enculturate them as British citizens, playing a part in civic life, while not compromising the distinctiveness of their faith and its practice.

Palimpsests and urban pasts: The janus-faced nature of whitechapel

This article examines how palimpsests in city spaces are mediated and negotiated by pedestrians’ individual everyday experiences. The literature on city spaces and palimpsests is rich; however, it has not examined the sharing and fusing of palimpsests into everyday life. To fill this lacuna, we explore how pedestrians mediate the physical path of the parcellations and the layers of meanings accrued over the years. We describe what we term the “Janus face of Whitechapel Road” that characterizes the multidimensional and ever-changing face of London as a world city. We look at the different traffic hinges distributed throughout the urban setting and track people as they encounter these historical and aesthetic landmarks. The experience of London’s palimpsests is an exemplar of this Janus’s face, governed by transitions, time, duality, and passages.

Coins

The evidence provided by coins has not been systematically incorporated in studies of ancient sport and spectacle. Coins are a source material as important as other documentary and visual sources; arguably, they are potentially of even greater importance, since coins constitute a more complete visual record than any other surviving form of ancient art. Students of sport and spectacle that will benefit most from numismatics are those who grapple with questions about identity, perception, and political expediency in the ancient games. This contribution explores the different ways in which sport and spectacle were referred to on Greek and Roman coins. In the Greek world, city-states referred to festivals and athletics on their coins to announce their identities, whether through the depiction of Panhellenic festivals, local competitions, or the renowned athletes to which they were home. Even under Roman rule, coins of the Greek cities made reference to games in this way. In the Roman republic and empire, coin designs dealt more with the ideological agenda of the authority behind the production of coins (e.g., republican moneyer, late republican triumvir, or the emperor). As a result, depictions of games tended to reflect political expediency. For instance, some republican moneyers promised to hold games if elected to the aedileship and some emperors commemorated their sponsorship of and provisioning for games. Many coins that celebrated certain festivals or construction work on entertainment buildings may have been produced for special distributions, perhaps at the festivals or dedicatory games in question.

The World City

In this chapter, we begin to reconstruct Nemesius’ anthropology, beginning with On Human Nature 1. And what we are meant to take from Nemesius’ prologue is something he calls a ‘familiar’ idea: that the world is a divine polity. The Platonic commentator Calcidius seems to have been a rough contemporary of Nemesius’ (and may have been a Syrian). In the first pages of his monumental Timaeus commentary, Calcidius refers to the ‘city or republic of this sensible world’. Nemesius never uses such precise terminology, but there is much to suggest that he structures his treatise with an eye to this archaic, yet philosophically sophisticated world-picture. It is in his prologue, too, that Nemesius sketches his theory of human origins—featuring a bold interpretation of the Fall which seems to turn upon his use of Galen’s medical vocabulary.

Ideas for a Reconstruction

Stoic philosophers in antiquity held that ‘the world is like a city and a polity’, and that human nature is like ‘a code of civil law’ (Cicero, De Finibus III). In his late-antique treatise On Human Nature, Nemesius rejects a variety of Stoic tenets. His world city is certainly not theirs. Nevertheless, this chapter argues that the Syrian philosopher-bishop held—with the Stoics—that humans are, by birth, world-citizens who are in communion with the whole of creation, and indeed, with the Demiurge. It is the ancient idea of a ‘world city’, it is claimed here, which gives structural and conceptual unity to On Human Nature—a unity which many of Nemesius’ interpreters have failed to discern.

Bridging Theory on Global Corporate Hierarchy and City Diplomacy: The Case of China

This study tests the relationship between the hierarchical position of cities in the global economy and a typology of cultural, economic, political, and social external relations, namely city diplomacy. We conduct this test on a sample of 46 Chinese cities, seeking to bridge otherwise separate existing theories on the structure of the world city hierarchy and varied dimensions of city diplomacy. Contrary to expectations, we find that the aggregate of the typology of city diplomacy, rather than only the economic dimension, is most closely associated with position in the world city hierarchy. This tentatively suggests that the collective effect of internationally-oriented cultural, economic, political and social activities in Chinese cities reflect the global structure of the highest levels of globalized urban wealth.