Marcus Grant

I have been working in the field of sustainability and public health in consultancy, academia and with government for over 25 years. Most recently as Associate Professor and Deputy Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Healthy Urban Environments at the University of the West of England, Bristol. I am Editor-in-Chief of the Routledge journal Cities & Health.

With academic freedom becoming more and more limited in Universities, I now align closely with a para-academic identity. That implies working with academic methods and tools but at large in society not just in university environments. I am also the archetypal boundary spanner, I bridge with increasing degrees of ease the silos between the all too separate worlds of: public health (as Fellow of the Faculty of Public Health); urbanism (as a member of the Landscape Institute); and ecological systems (my first degree).

I have been working closely with the World Health Organisation's European Healthy Cities Network for a decade and a half, most recently as the Deputy Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Healthy Urban Environments, Bristol.

The focus of my work with the World Health Organisation has been non-communicable disease. Across Europe not only are the numbers of preventable illnesses and lives lost stark, but growing inequality ensures that this burden does not fall evenly across the population. Young people, old people, the unemployed and those already vulnerable account for a higher proportion of ill-health.

If we are to get serious about creating healthier cities, we need to drive change. We need to challenge the forces that continually push population health, as an objective for mainstream urbanism, off the agenda. As city developers, urbanists and built environment professionals; we all need to become a hell of a lot more health literate.

My publications focus on giving readers the tools, the evidence and the concepts they will need to advocate for, and create, healthier places for us all to live.