Connecting climate action with other sustainable development goals. Nature Sustainability.

The urban built environment is underpinned by an increasingly complex digital infrastructure, which is posing a variety of unpredictable and unprecedented challenges for urban governance. The paper outlines the key strands of digital infrastructures which underpin the urban polity, including the role of global technology providers in shaping the urban governance agenda around digital policy; and the emergence of smart city strategies. The paper is illustrated using empirical examples drawn from Australian digital infrastructure development, with reference to the international landscape of 'smart city' developments. It argues that there is a significant mismatch between the often small scale, bounded capabilities of municipal government, and the actively large-scale operations of technology firms.

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There is a growing awareness among city leaders and policy-makers of the impact of the urban environment on health outcomes and inequalities. Increasingly, practitioners in built environment city departments, such as housing, planning, transport and regeneration, seek new tools and guidance to understand how their respective policies and decisions can support the creation of healthier cities. This paper presents the development of a global index to help city leaders and practitioners understand their role in delivering health outcomes through urban environment policies and programmes. The Building Research Establishment's international Healthy Cities Index (BRE HCI) contains 10 environment categories and 58 indicators, supported by a causal pathways framework. This was achieved through an iterative process including: stakeholder engagement, evaluating research evidence, selecting indicators and identifying data sources. We tested the index and causal pathways approach on two case study cities: Dubai and London. We found that they contributed to: raising awareness of the links between the environment and health; identifying shared responsibilities and the need to work across departmental silos; and uncovering the competing demands faced by some departments (and private sector stakeholders) as they seek to deliver health promoting environments alongside other objectives. ARTICLE HISTORY