It is expected that by 2030, more than 60% of the world’s population will be living within an urban area. To inform future urban health system governance in expanding urban areas, we propose the Urban Health System Governance Framework that identifies health policy co-benefits between SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-being) and SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities). We utilize two case studies to supplement our framework. Our first case study describes the Youth at a Healthy Weight (Jongeren op Gezond Gewicht – JOGG) intervention in the Netherlands. Our second case study describes the Barcelona Superblocks, which consist of amalgamations of blocks throughout the city to improve the habitability of public spaces, sustainable mobility, urban green, and promote residents’ participation and co-responsibility. Two important themes necessary to understand co-benefits between the two SDGs emerged. First, achieving SDG 11, that is making cities healthy, sustainability, inclusivity, resilience, are prerequisites to achieving good health and wellbeing. Second, addressing health inequities should be a strong priority to ensure urban growth is sustainable, inclusive, and resilient, and to promote equity, the health system and other urban governance structures must work together to create strong intersectoral collaboration.

This chapter examines the politics and the practice of partnership in the urban renewal era. This public-private dynamic was the central political relationship which drove urban transformation; it was codified and mandated explicitly within planning legislation and central policy diktats and pursued energetically by many individual local authorities eager to remake the image and economy of their towns. I show how this hybrid, mixed economy of planning was situated within the wider political economy of post-war Britain, tracking the political influence and connections of the property and construction sectors as well as the attitudes and policy positions of both the Conservative and Labour Parties. I also trace the operation and impact of partnership-based urban renewal on the ground in various cities, focusing in particular on Manchester, Liverpool and Nottingham. Local authorities had a range of motivations for working with the commercial development sector and their experiences were not uniform. The chapter shows that some cities managed to navigate the new terrain of public-private developmentalism more successfully than others, but I also stress the basic asymmetries involved in these relationships, particularly for those places that were struggling most economically.

The Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) is a longitudinal, observational study initiated in 2004 with the aim to develop and validate biomarkers for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) trials. From its inception, ADNI has been a model of a public–private partnership, with industry partners involved not only through financial support but in a guidance capacity. Through the development of standardized methods, ADNI has collected imaging and fluid biomarker data from cognitively normal, early and late mild cognitive impairment, and AD participants which is available to qualified researchers without embargo. Moreover, these methods have been incorporated into companion studies worldwide. The data that have been collected have provided important insights into the progression of AD pathology over time, assists in understanding which biomarkers may be most useful in clinical trials and have facilitated the design of studies of disease-modifying therapies.

The use of artificial intelligence to remove so-called terrorist content from online platforms, is the object of this chapter. As a first step, the analysis identifies the complex and tangled relationship between different levels in regulating the issue. In doing so, the author notes that the United Nations’ role seem to be particularly unclear and major international initiatives – as the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism – aimed at managing the challenge of terrorist content online are characterized by a lack of democratic architecture and even of transparency as regards its governance and activities. As a consequence, the removal of “dangerous” content is often left to voluntary, informal and unregulated partnerships between the public and the private sector. As a second point, the analysis remarks that regional organizations – first of all, the European Union – are taking steps to try to regulate these partnerships, but the outcome is characterized by several drawbacks, both in terms of human rights protection and institutional issues. Ultimately, the chapter assesses these challenges through the lenses of constitutional law and argues in favor of a more pronounced role of international and regional bodies, which avert excessive informality and privatization in such a sensitive field.

This chapter focuses on skill, and considers how the sixteenth-century imperial kiln administrators managed their workforce. Skilled craftsmen were in high demand, but they were difficult to control. Most of the workers were mobile; they could take their labour to the imperial kiln, but also find work in the private kilns. The repeated attempts of the kiln administrators to identify skilled workers and bind them to the imperial kilns, and their ongoing expressions of concern over the issue of skilled labour underscore how difficult it was to get hold of good craftsmen. Circulation and mobility characterized the workers' presence in Jingdezhen. The more goods and people circulated and flowed between the various spaces, the more the adminstrators sought to assert their control over it those flows, and the wider the discrepancies between the written representations of the idealized circumstances the administrators envisioned and the actual patterns of movement and flow of resources and skills. Ultimately, the kiln administrators had to reconcile themselves to their inability in asserting control over the labour force. Material and human resources were fluid and flowed relatively freely through the mazelike veins of the Jingdezhen network.

This chapter provides further context to the impact of project finance mechanisms by examining the Ugandan Bujagali Hydroelectric Power Project referred to in the Preface. This case study is different from the others. It focusses on the interface of contractual and policy instruments with indigenous peoples’ rights to land and then casts the net wider to examine how complex pricing terms and the inequitable negotiation of concessionary power purchase agreements (PPA), in which the government is the end buyer, will have implications for overall vulnerability; for example, by locking governments into an overall bad deal in which all the risk is passed onto the state which has little control over spiralling electricity costs. Thinking about these debt contract–community linkages and what might be done within the context of an important negotiated contract such as the PPA is crucial for two reasons: that of the spread of supposedly cleaner and greener hydroelectric projects worldwide to meet energy demand and the growth of the ‘people first’ trend in public-private partnerships in the quest to mobilise the private sector towards the Sustainable Development Goals.