City life-courses: A novel conceptual framing to secure healthy and sustainable urban futures

We present ‘city life-courses’ as a novel conceptual framing that can aid understanding of urban transitions and strengthen urban practice. The core aim is to reorient discussions within urban studies by highlighting the need to move beyond debates over ‘urban theory’ to develop conceptual framings that bridge high-level philosophical and theoretical understandings of cities with the ‘means of implementation’ by which we can achieve sustainable urban futures. We illustrate the value of this framing by applying it to the specific problem domain of urban health. A city life-course perspective emphasizes, first, the multi-dimensionality of urban transitions, and that future health risks in towns and cities will emerge through complex interactions between demographic change, urban spatial development, economic development, climatic and environmental transformations, and the ideas and practices of governance. Second, it foregrounds the multi-temporality of urban transitions, and that the structural processes shaping urban health unfold through various change-rates and over a range of timeframes. Anticipating how such processes will interact in complex, non-linear ways over multiple spatial and temporal scales will enhance our capacities to anticipate urban health risks and to effect interventions to secure healthy and sustainable urban futures. To demonstrate how this conceptual framing may be employed to think about and respond to complex urban challenges in novel and productive ways, we develop a four-fold typology of city life-courses based on the varying demographic and developmental characteristics of cities.