Urbane Gesundheitsgerechtigkeit
Iris Dzudzek, Anke Strüver
Abstract
Health injustice kills on all spatial scales. The WHO agrees on this with the German Robert-Koch-Institute. Justice has been a core concern of human geography since David Harvey's "Social Justice and the City" (2009 [1973]). It is therefore astonishing that Critical Urban Geography, Medical and Health Geography have so far devoted little attention to this topic. Public Health scholars define "social determinants of health" mostly in terms of quantitative risk assessment. However, poverty, lack of education, migration experience, poor housing and exposure to environmental toxins in the city do not necessarily make people ill or automatically reduce their life expectancy. In this paper, we argue that falling ill is a socially structured process which we address as Critical Urban Geography of embodied inequalities. With eco-social epidemiology and critical social epidemiology, we propose two approaches to Critical Urban Research in order to explain the complex mediation processes that produce embodied inequalities and injustices in the city. We understand these mediations as entanglements, as intertwining of biology and the social, of ecologies and bodies, of society and health, of the global and the local. Taking Hamburgs' urban quarter "Veddel" as an example we show how health justice can be explored in Critical Urban Geography and how a geography of embodied inequality can contribute to urban health justice.