Healthy Cities in the SDG Era

Sustainable Development Goal 13: Climate Action, focuses on taking urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts.
Dr. Paula Braitstein is an epidemiologist living and working in Kenya since 2007. Most of her research has been oriented around major health and social issues in East Africa including HIV prevention, treatment, and the cascade of HIV care, and high risk children and youth including those who have been orphaned (from HIV and other causes), separated, abandoned, and those who are street-connected. Dr. Braitstein is a CIHR Chair of Applied Public Health Research, and won the 2017 CIHR Institute of Public and Population Health Mid-Career Trail Blazer Award for her work with street-connected and homeless youth in East Africa. In addition to doing her own research, Paula is Co-Field Director of Research for the Academic Model Providing Access to Healthcare (AMPATH) Consortium in which the University of Toronto (Faculty of Medicine and the Dalla Lana School of Public Health) is a partner. Dr. Braitstein is a passionate environmentalist in Kenya and leads a graduate seminar course on planetary health for the DLSPH and Moi University, School of Public Health (Kenya).
Victoria Haldane is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation, she is also a student in the collaborative specialization in global health at the DLSPH. She is co-founder of Emerging Leaders for Environmental Sustainability in Healthcare (ELESH) and a junior fellow with the Centre for Sustainable Health Systems. Her research interests include implementation science to improve quality of care, health systems resilience, and making our health systems better for people and the planet.
CREDITS: This podcast is co-hosted by Dr. Erica Di Ruggiero, Director of the Centre for Global Health, and Ophelia Michaelides, Manager of the Centre for Global Health, at the DLSPH, U of T, and produced by Elizabeth Loftus. Audio editing is by Sylvia Lorico. Music is produced by Julien Fortier and Patrick May. It is made with the support of the School of Cities at U of T.

Sustainable Development Goal 2: Zero Hunger aims to end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture.
In this episode of Healthy Cities in the SDG Era, Dr. Erica Di Ruggiero will speak with two experts about the relationship between poverty and hunger, or insecure access to food, within both Canadian and global contexts. Discussions will also focus on underlying issues of systemic racism and social inequities, that lead to a disproportionate prevalence of hunger and food security amongst different social groups.
Dr. Valerie Tarasuk is a Professor in the Department of Nutritional Sciences, cross-appointed to the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. Her primary research focus is household food insecurity. She has led several tri-council research grants to elucidate the scope, nature, and health implications of this problem in Canada, assess the effectiveness of community responses, and determine how public policies and programs impact food insecurity prevalence and severity. In 2011, she led the establishment of PROOF, an interdisciplinary research program working to identify effective policy approaches and mobilize knowledge to reduce household food insecurity in Canada.
Allison Daniel is a PhD Candidate in Nutritional Sciences (in the Faculty of Medicine) and a student in the Collaborative Specialization in Global Health. Her research focuses on children with severe acute malnutrition requiring inpatient admission in Blantyre, Malawi. More specifically, she is interested in the pathways from maternal factors and care practices to child outcomes including development and nutritional status in severely malnourished children.

CREDITS: This podcast is co-hosted by Dr. Erica Di Ruggiero, Director of the Centre for Global Health, and Ophelia Michaelides, Manager of the Centre for Global Health, at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, and produced by Elizabeth Loftus. Audio editing is by Anwaar Baobeid. Music is produced by Julien Fortier and Patrick May. It is made with the support of the School of Cities at the University of Toronto.

Sustainable Development Goal 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities, focuses on making cities and settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. This is significant, as currently half of the global population, or 3.5 billion people, live in cities today, and a projected 5 billion people, or 60% of the world’s population will live in cities by 2030.

SDG 11 is one of the two foundational SDGs of Healthy Cities in the SDG Era, alongside SDG3: Good Health and Wellbeing. Throughout the series, we’ll explore the ways that these SDGs intersect with other goals, including gender equality, education, reducing inequalities, zero hunger, and climate action.

Dr. Patricia O’Campo is the Interim Executive Director of the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute, a Scientist at the MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions, and Professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. She holds a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Population Health Intervention Research and has an established program of research focused on policies and health, and how urban and social policies can ensure people are healthy.

Garrett Morgan is a doctoral student in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto working under the co-supervision of Dr. Blake Poland at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health and Dr. John Robinson at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Garrett is also a student in the Collaborative Specializations in Global Health and Environment and Health, at U of T. He is an urban planner and sustainable development consultant with professional experience in the public, private, and non-profit sectors in rural, suburban, and urban environments in Canada and the United States. His research explores the relationships between resilience, sustainability, and equity in Toronto’s marginalized communities in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

CREDITS: This podcast is co-hosted by Dr. Erica Di Ruggiero, Director of the Centre for Global Health, and Ophelia Michaelides, Manager of the Centre for Global Health, at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, and produced by Elizabeth Loftus. Audio editing is by Anwaar Baobeid. Music is produced by Julien Fortier and Patrick May. It is made with the support of the School of Cities at the University of Toronto.

Sustainable Development Goal 6: Clean Water and Sanitation, focuses on ensuring access to water and sanitation for all.

Professor David Meyer completed his PhD and M.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering at MIT and is an alumnus of Engineering Science (Energy Option) at U of T. Before his graduate studies, David worked for Engineers Without Borders Canada (EWB) in Ghana and for a engineering consulting firm called HydraTek in Toronto. His research focuses on urban water distribution infrastructure, and specifically how this infrastructure behaves in Mega Cities in the Global South. His research group works on projects including new ways of managing and modelling megacity water networks, especially when they turn on and off frequently. These intermittent systems affect one billion people! He also runs the Sensing Health In Toilets Lab (an acronym he is proud of) where they try to measure the health of a community from within its toilets.

Samantha LeValley is a first-year PhD Student in Civil Engineering in the Centre for Global Engineering at UofT. She completed her MASc in Civil Engineering at UofT in 2021 along with the Collaborative Specialization in Global Health. The goal of her PhD research is to understand how equitable current improved rural water supplies are and how that equity changes with seasonality and compares between two different contexts in the Global South.

CREDITS: This podcast is co-hosted by Dr. Erica Di Ruggiero, Director of the Centre for Global Health, and Ophelia Michaelides, Manager of the Centre for Global Health, at the DLSPH, U of T, and produced by Elizabeth Loftus. Audio editing is by Sylvia Lorico. Music is produced by Julien Fortier and Patrick May. It is made with the support of the School of Cities at U of T.

SDG 10: Reduced Inequalities, focuses on reducing inequality within and among countries.
There is a stark wealth gap between the richest and poorest in Canada. According to a 2020 report from the Parliamentary Budget Office, the wealthiest 0.01% percent of Canadian families have a net wealth of $654 billion, which is 5.6% of the national total. The poorest 40% of Canadian families, on the other hand, have a net wealth of $132 billion, or, 1.1% of the national total.

This gap has grown during the COVID-19 pandemic – the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives reported that Canada’s top 20 billionaries have become $37 billion richer during the COVID-19 pandemic, earning an average of $2 billion each. This has happened alongside significant job losses amongst the working class.

Toronto has one of the highest costs of living of cities in Canada. The cost of housing, food, transit, childcare, and postsecondary tuition have increased significantly over the past three decades, while incomes have stagnated. The impacts of this drastic increase in the cost of living have had unequal impacts. Racialized groups, recent immigrants/migrants, and young people living in Toronto have become poorer over time, as these groups have not experienced income increases over the past 35 years. While income inequality is an important metric to consider when thinking about inequality, it is not the only one. In this episode, our guests approach the goal of Reducing Inequality from a more critical lens.
Dr. Roberta Timothy is an Assistant Professor in the Social and Behavioural Health Sciences Division at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, at the University of Toronto. Roberta is also co-founder and consultant at Continuing Healing Consultants, where she implements and teaches her intersectional mental health model “Anti Oppression Psychotherapy”. She specializes in the areas of intersectionality, critical human rights, and health ethics; health and race; transnational Indigenous health; and anti-oppression/anti-colonial approaches to mental health (including anti-oppression psychotherapy) and research methodology.
Amrita Kumar-Ratta is a third year PhD student in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto. She is a student in the Collaborative Specialization in Global Health and South Asian Studies at U of T. Amrita’s research focuses on gendered and ethnoracial constructions of inequality, particularly on the geopolitics of marriage and fertility in Punjabi communities in Canada.
CREDITS: This podcast is co-hosted by Dr. Erica Di Ruggiero, Director of the Centre for Global Health, and Ophelia Michaelides, Manager of the Centre for Global Health, at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, and produced by Elizabeth Loftus. Audio editing is by Anwaar Baobeid. Music is produced by Julien Fortier and Patrick May. It is made with the support of the School of Cities at the University of Toronto.