Societies differ in their inhabitants’ mental well-being. Many affluent and democratic countries, such as the UK and Australia, rank significantly lower in mental well-being than many developing countries, such as Tanzania and Dominican Republic. Many societal factors can either decrease or improve the mental well-being of the people living in those societies. Much of the contemporary burden of depression arises from an evolutionary mismatch between human psychobiology and contemporary western lifestyles characterized by chronic stress, social fragmentation, physical inactivity, circadian disruption, and ultraprocessed diets. These conditions promote low-grade systemic inflammation and dysregulate evolved mood-regulation systems. However, there are measures that societies can implement to address these issues. These include providing safer and more stimulating childhood environments; promoting healthy lifestyles through various policy measures; refining societal values from status competition toward eudaimonia; using evolutionary psychology and biophilic design in urban planning; and giving more opportunities for individuals to discover their ikigai, “a reason for being.” More broadly, not all cultural and technological innovations are inherently negative for human health and well-being. It would be sensible to take advantage of the best parts of these innovations and developments while continuously acknowledging the core constituents of a well-led and fulfilling life.

This chapter explores how public policy shapes healthy neighbourhoods and communities by addressing place as a fundamental determinant of health and wellbeing. It outlines a causation framework emphasising the interplay of biological, social, economic, historical, and environmental determinants, highlighting how places significantly influence health through material, psychosocial, biological, and behavioural pathways. Central to this discussion is the role of intersectoral public policies and multisectoral collaboration, particularly through the ‘Health in All Policies’ (HiAP) approach, to address complex societal issues across multiple domains, including housing, transport, employment, social infrastructure, and public spaces. The chapter introduces the ‘Place in All Policies’ (PiAP) model, adapting HiAP by emphasising community-driven, ecological, and culturally responsive governance frameworks. It concludes that effective policy must recognise and incorporate local and Indigenous knowledge, fostering community engagement and integrated policy frameworks to enhance the health, resilience, and sustainability of communities.

This chapter explores the complexities and responsibilities of allyship in planning and placemaking, emphasising the critical importance of adopting a Country-centred approach. Reflecting on personal experiences as a non-Indigenous planner, the author highlights the necessity of confronting the colonial roots of land-use planning in Australia and embracing a more inclusive, two-way model of planning that incorporates Indigenous perspectives and values. Drawing on collaborative experiences with Indigenous colleagues and communities, the chapter identifies practical strategies for systemic change, including building team capacity, developing Country-informed principles, and addressing power imbalances in project governance. The author argues for a courageous and humble approach to allyship, urging non-Indigenous Australians to actively participate in truth-telling, reconciliation, and the healing of Country. Ultimately, the chapter advocates for a transformative shift towards inter-cultural practice, promoting a sustainable and equitable future grounded in mutual respect and shared responsibility for Country.

This chapter explores the cities of Northern Europe as a plethora of difference and similarity, first by considering the possibility of a Northern European region as it might emerge from climate, politics or urbanisation. It traces, a double process of urban material planning, growth and building and, on the other hand, an overall notion of a (Northern) European urban and regional identity. This plays out over a broad process from the liberal cities of the later 1800s, through the inter-war crisis and post-war changes (very distinct between Nordic and Baltic cities), to the post-Cold War period (where some similarities reappear).The chapter also focuses on the welfare period, where state and municipality enter into new negotiations. The social programmes of Nordic statecraft mean large-scale public housing, regulation and institutions, causing new cleavages between city and country. The new role of the market in urbanisation from the 1970s onwards is also considered, intersecting from 1989 with the end of the Cold War, and a reconnection between Baltic and Nordic cities. The chapter evaluates the influence of globalisation and the role of modernised cities both economically and culturally, and thus the notion and identity of Nordic and Northern European cities are connected with regional urban development.

This chapter surveys the evolution of urbanisation in Western Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The discussion follows the urban geography of the region, how and why it changed, and the relationship to industrialisation, capitalist production, market and transport networks. It considers the ways in which cities and towns along the Channel coast and North Sea, the coast of the Atlantic, and along the Mediterranean both substantiate and exhaust the vision of ‘Western Europe’ and evidence the richness of European patterns of urban life. Emphasis is on the density of the urban network as well as the multiplicity and distinctiveness of urban society in Western Europe as it evolved over time. Attention is given to the bourgeois and working-class experience, the rise of urban reform and planning, and the dissemination of Western European urban patterns as a model of modernity. The chapter recounts the fate of cities in the first and second world wars. It gives full attention to the late twentieth century and how Western European urban life changed under the influence of modernisation schemes, post-industrial society and globalisation.

This chapter delineates Eastern, East Central, and Southeastern Europe, highlights its shifting geographies for the study of cities, and argues for the need to see the region ‘between the Baltic and the Adriatic’ as one whole. Whereas the imperial capitals Vienna, St Petersburg and Istanbul tend to be considered either not representative or beyond the delineated borders of the region, the chapter pays closer attention to other cities, especially ‘second capitals’, regional and provincial centres, ports and border towns. In the imperial context of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, major urban planning and improvement projects are analysed as the responses to the perceived backwardness of the region as compared to their counterparts in Western and German-speaking Central Europe, where the latter served as useful models. When addressing various attempts at ‘modernisation’, cities emerge as a group that displayed similar urbanisation patterns and chronology, as well as persistent ethnic and religious diversity. Their twentieth-century experiences were also shaped by the ‘long’ First World War and the accompanying revolts and revolutions. Many became sites of nation-building in the inter-war period, they also shared similar pathways during and after the Second World War, when they became sites of urban programmes of state socialism and post-socialist transformation

European urbanism in the Americas cannot be extricated from the diverse processes of conquest and colonisation that agents of Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English and French imperial expansion executed over land, water, peoples and natural and mineral resources. European urbanisms in the New World were neither manifested uniformly across the entire continent nor a product of a social consensus among Europeans of what a city was and what it was supposed to look like. Desire and ability to direct urban settlement were also unequally distributed; best endowed with both were the Spanish monarchs. Among both Hispanics and Indians, they deployed the municipality as an ‘instrument of colonisation’. Sometimes subsuming indigenous urban centers, new towns and cities were laid out with straight streets arranged in orthogonal patterns around preferably symmetrical main squares where secular, ecclesiastical and commercial functions were housed and exercised. Urban geometry and hierarchy assisted in the systematisation of rule.

The roster of industrial cities includes not only single-industry towns but also ports, capitals, suburban factory districts and regional clusters of manufacturing centres. Over time, technological changes turned all modern cities into industrialised cities. This chapter follows the spread of urban industrial production across Europe and into overseas empires and examines its impact on local environments. It then traces the planning efforts of state governments and architects to combat pollution and to redesign manufacturing towns. De-industrialisation in the second half of the twentieth century added unemployment and emigration to the challenges of industrial cities, which had to substitute new functions for manufacturing jobs. Multi-functional cities with well-educated workforces have found this transition easier than smaller, more specialised manufacturing towns.

Planning as a discipline developed in response to some of the challenges that occurred following the Industrial Revolution: health, hygiene or housing. A key field of intervention for the new discipline was infrastructure development for transport and communication in line with evolving technologies. Globalisation and the exchange of commodities around the world led to ever more extensive projects. The shared needs of infrastructural planning went hand in hand with the sharing of ideas and concepts of planning and their exchange around the world. This article explores four examples of European planning and their key actors in four distinct periods through the lens of the global infrastructural turn: the age of rail (1850s to 1910s), the age of motorisation (1910s to 1950s), the age of flight (1950s to 1980s), and the age of increasing digital communication (1980s to 2000s). Understanding the embedded role of infrastructure in planning practice can help promote a system approach much needed to address contemporary challenges in the design of urban spaces.

Chapter 4 uses assemblage theory, which is an anti-colonialist theory of social and spatial construction that has traction in the Global South, to show how urban inequalities become assembled, disassembled, and reassembled over time and yet how grassroots activism for social and environmental justice and for community resilience can change the form and functions of cities. Buchanan arose at a time when the role of urban planning in the US cities was growing but largely conceived as the top–down imposition of order and dominant values on urban space. However, we are increasingly aware of just how contested and evolving the practice of urban planning and urban development are. Case studies of green gentrification from Los Angeles, California and Accra, Ghana illustrate the competing ideological perspectives on resilience in cities and the potential for and yet tentativeness of progress towards social justice in urban planning. The chapter explores the connections of racism in American land use with colonialism in the Global South, and the commonalities in the experiences of grassroots social-justice movements across cities worldwide.

While Chapter 4 outlines the national pattern of visibility projects and the forced exit of private firms from the urban bus sector, this chapter uses comparative case studies, in-depth interviews, and process tracing to explore the causal mechanism linking visibility projects to deprivatization. Guangzhou and Nanning, two capital cities in neighboring provinces in southern China, are selected for a most-similar case comparison. Guangzhou deprivatized its bus sector in 2007, whereas Nanning continues to have a privately controlled bus sector.

Guangzhou initiated multiple visibility projects in its urban bus sector, driven by ambitious city leaders seeking attention from the Party-state. In contrast, Nanning launched only a few projects, as its city leaders sought to avoid attention following recent political turmoil. By contrasting these two cases and demonstrating why deprivatization occurred in Guangzhou but not in Nanning, this chapter illustrates how visibility projects led to the end of marketization in China’s urban bus sector.

Even in the most mundane sectors, firms are still required to provide political services. This chapter examines how the urban bus sector across Chinese cities became a focal point for visibility projects starting in the early 2000s and how this trend led to an uncoordinated, nationwide deprivatization of the urban bus sector by city governments beginning in 2005. These actions contradicted policies that encouraged private provision of bus services.

Using an original dataset on visibility projects and sectoral data from 288 Chinese cities covering the urban bus sector between 1996 and 2016, the chapter demonstrates how successive waves of visibility projects were closely linked to the reversal of marketization in the sector. The chapter opens with an account from a city government official describing their efforts to force private firms out of the urban bus sector, and is enriched with detailed interview notes throughout.

This chapter continues the story of Sofia’s water supply, beginning with the political turmoil that marred urban fabrics and economies across the Ottoman Balkans from the 1790s to the 1820s and ending in 1912 when, after a long series of failed attempts, post-Ottoman Sofia received its first modern water supply system. I emphasize the similarity in the predicaments that shaped the Ottoman and Bulgarian policies in the fields of urban planning, underground infrastructures, and natural resource management. I explain how a series of extreme human-made and natural phenomena, including banditry, war, and intensified seismicity limited the capabilities of the Ottoman authorities to accomplish their modernizing intentions. In post-Ottoman Bulgaria, the modernization of urban fabrics was seen as a statement of the superiority of the nation-state over its former imperial master. However, in a series of attempts to meet the water needs of the national capital’s constantly expanding population, the post-Ottoman authorities found themselves continually unable to come up with solutions superior to the water supply practices of their predecessors. The chapter argues that throughout the long nineteenth century Sofia’s water supply functioned within the bounds of the system established by the Ottomans.

This chapter focuses on dynamic water resource management for regenerative cities, emphasising the need for a more sustainable, circular approach to urban water management. As cities face increasing water scarcity, compounded by rapid urbanisation and climate change, traditional methods of water supply are no longer sufficient. The chapter advocates for a transition from linear water management systems towards more integrated and regenerative models. It introduces key concepts such as cities acting as water supply catchments, where urban areas manage and recycle their own water through innovative technologies like rainwater harvesting, greywater reuse, and advanced wastewater treatment. The chapter highlights global best practices, including Tokyo’s water-saving initiatives, Singapore’s closed water loop system, and China’s Sponge City programme, illustrating how cities can adopt diverse, multifunctional water strategies to secure their long-term water supply. Additionally, the chapter underscores the importance of blue–green infrastructure, which integrates natural and built systems to provide ecosystem services, mitigate flooding, and enhance urban resilience. By integrating dynamic water resource management with urban planning, cities can reduce their environmental footprint and foster sustainable development, making water security a central component of regenerative city planning.

The objective of this chapter is to more fully explore how urban environmental change takes place. The role and significance of economic development and normative planning efforts are explored. These conditions further help refine understanding of how different drivers and social and economic forces influence how cities both create and respond to the environmental crises and how transitions are manifested. Several different narratives of urban transitions are defined. These include urban transitions as sequence, collapse, advance, futures, and just sustainability. An integrated framework that links the different elements of urban environmental transitions is presented and discussed. The framework includes four steps – stress, crisis, transition, and transformation – with coupled components and elements such as drivers, spheres of action, and process and product outcomes. A review of the application areas and specific cases are presented as an introduction to the next section of the book.