15. Practices of Health in Unruly Environments

Our lived environments – the social, natural, and built worlds around us – are undergoing complex, unpredictable, and disruptive changes that are difficult to control. As these unruly environmental changes become embodied, they produce new forms of health inequity, vulnerability and risk. In the face of changes in the lived environment, actors engage in practices of health that seek to produce healthier human-environment relationships through patterns of activity performed with purpose and intent. Practices of health may be bodily, social, spatial, institutional, and/or professional. They may be carried out by a range of actors, and may span different geographic and temporal scales. These practices seek to produce health through healing, care, survival, joy, hope, justice and/or the prevention of harm. Thus, practices of health range from an individual gathering waste on a local shoreline, to researchers investigating emergent patterns of respiratory disease, to government authorities creating public health policies, to grassroots groups protesting environmental injustice. For urban planners and practitioners in allied fields, such as public health, who are grappling with how to create healthy human habitats within environments in constant flux, practices of health represent an important area for research and intervention. This volume of Projections explores the theme of practices of health in unruly environments with a specific focus on articulating lessons from already-existing practices of health for practitioners in applied fields such as urban planning and public health.