Introduction

Abstract

The air we breathe, the climate we share with others and the streets we walk down in the city where we might work and live are all just some of the many forms of urban commons. Like all commons they foreground the tensions between social demands that are shared by large numbers and particular rights that might be exercised by individuals, minorities and majorities. Conceptually, the notion of the city commons spans scholarly traditions. They range from empirically oriented political science to strands of critical urban studies informed by Deleuzian and autonomist philosophical and political traditions (compare Berge, Cole and Ostrom, 2012; Hardt and Negri, 2009: 252-6; Amin and Thrift, 2017). How we make sense of what I might do and what we should do has always been at the heart of the urban condition. But how we sustain the long-term future of economy, ecology and social life in a city that is shared by contemporary demographics and future generations defines the instrumental imperatives of a twenty-first-century planet shaped by urban growth. And for the interests of this volume they particularly shape the chances of living a life that is healthy in the cities of the contemporary moment and the immediate future. 1 The city is both a frame and a container of determinants of public health. The conditioning context of natural and built environments, collective access to food, water and air and diverse regimes of socio-economics and governance define the material framing and distal determinants of public health, while it is in the spaces of the urban that the aggregations of individual behaviours, genetic and epigenetic configurations, nutrition and living mediate more proximal determinants of longevity and morbidity. Both are addressed by public health systems that in the main try to optimise