The world is urbanizing at an unprecedented rate. It is estimated that in the near
future urban landscapes for another ca. 2.7 billion people will be built on planet
Earth, approximately converting land equivalent to the size of South Africa. Such land
conversion, coupled with citizen densification, increasing in-equalities, shifting diets,
and emerging technologies, challenge human well-being and pose ever-increasing
demand for resources generated by the Biosphere.
This Research Topic concentrates on the various ways urbanization can promote
individual well-being (mental, physical, and social health) as well as ecological health
(a healthy Biosphere). What kind of affordances for human health promotion can
urbanization include? What kinds of affordances for a psychological connection
with nature can urbanization include? What kinds of nudges for pro-environmental
behavior and consumption (decreasing detrimental consumption behaviors) can be
actively designed in urban settings?
The Research Topic at hand uses a transactional approach, where an affordance
can be understood as a non-deterministic in-situ precondition for a human
activity, enabled by relations between abilities of an individual with features of an
environment. We encourage a broad definition of the concept of affordances, where
‘the environment’ must not be restricted to the material biophysical environment
alone, but also could be combined with social immaterial features. We see that
the transactional approach of this Research Topic posits that meaning arises in
relations between humans and their environment, that it will be equally applicable
to natural and designed environments, and that it doesn’t regard dichotomies like
city-contra-nature or social-contra-ecological. Hence, this Research Topic is
interested in if the transactional approach can be used as a conceptual tool, not
only for promotion of mental, physical, and social health in cities, but simultaneously
for unraveling relations at the micro scale in cities which can be used for solutions
that also promote a healthy Biosphere.