From Health Councils to Healing Hubs

In 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the world, the cracks in the social, economic and political infrastructures that led to inequities between social groups began to be exposed.

Having spent the previous four years as a neuroscience lab focused on the built environment, we realised it was time to change. We felt that our job was to help people navigate the emerging urban health inequities in their professional capacities through a science informed library.

At Centric Lab, we focus on the barriers in the way of health equity. Our method is to prototype ways to use scientific evidence to support social justice movements, surface and socialise non-western knowledge about health and create ways to articulate the health injustices felt by many racialised and marginalised communities.

Launching the Urban Health Council

This led, in January 2021, to us launching the Urban Health Council – with the aim of helping to close the gaps in people’s knowledge about inequality and build more socially just urban places.

Impact on Urban Health joined as a partner in early 2022 to help find new ways to centre the voices of people with lived experience of health inequalities at the forefront of our research. Every year, we split the research programme into four quarters with corresponding topics. Throughout each quarter the Centric Lab team convened researchers, practitioners and community organisers to produce reports, with workshops and roundtables helping to disseminate the work to stakeholders.

Topics ranged from the role of data in health justice to understanding obesity as a consequence of trauma.

Perhaps the area of work that captured people’s attention most was a body of work titled The Planetary Dysregulation – a five-part report series supported by a four-part audio series with newly found collaborators, Guppi Bola and Dr Rhiannon Mihranian Osborne. It told the story of the links between systems rooted in supremacy, how contamination was leading to climate change and poor health outcomes in cities.

This last project brought in numerous enquiries, new friendships and collaboration opportunities as well as received 1000s of podcast downloads. Alongside the development of other projects, it started to show us a new path forward.

What we learnt

As we come to the end of the three-year partnership between Impact on Urban Health and the Centric Lab, there are four key themes we’ve learnt through shifting the power in health research:

From law to lore

Realising that there was never going to be enough evidence to change the laws that create pollution via contamination and that our scope was on changing the lore. This means reframing the way people understand pollution, the culture behind root causes, its impact on people’s health and what they can do to stop it.

From top-down to bottom-up

Understanding that it was not enough for us to research, analyse and comment on health matters, we needed to give space to people working in healthcare and delivering projects within communities to take the lead in shaping what research outputs looked like – such as pamphlets and zines – and what the research was trying to solve.

From the built environment to medicine & healthcare

Grasping that there was a limit in which the built environment sector could adapt to new, radical knowledge that was rooted in justice. This coincided with supporting health professionals to understand how to apply our playbook to their work.

From reform to autonomy

Understanding that making impactful change meant building the capacity for communities to act in their own interests and create their own systems of care, rather than asking those with power within the current systems to change the way they worked.

What’s next?

Our work is rooted in supporting people to advocate for their own communities to shape the systems based on their own environments and contexts. People already hold the knowledge and experience about how systems interact to create health inequities – what they need is an infrastructure to support them.

In 2026 we will be holding an event to celebrate the emergence of solidarity healing hubs. These are a way to support grassroots organising for communities and groups left out of traditional funding and support networks. You can find out more about them in our extended report Health Councils to Healing Hubs.