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Shilu Tong and colleagues describe the health consequences of extreme urban heat and the priorities for action and research to mitigate the harms

In Australia, and internationally, a shift is occurring towards high-density apartment living with initiatives and research showing an increased interest in the relations between health, wellbeing and apartment buildings. This study explores the complex associations between residents’ perceptions of their health and wellbeing and the apartment buildings where they live within the context of Sydney, Australia, as the case study. It challenges the fragmented approach previously used to study healthy apartment living and their underlying assumptions that do not account for a coupled human-environment systems view of health and wellbeing concerning apartment living. Qualitative research was used, which included in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 17 residents living in different apartment buildings, supplemented by fieldwork and narrated photographs. Using a structured iterative thematic analysis process, 20 areas of health and wellbeing influence (themes) were identified and further categorised using synthetic thinking into diverse, context-dependent, multilevel, and pervading influences. The findings from this exploratory study suggest a complex view of health and wellbeing by residents of apartment buildings and provide novel and important insights that have not been previously reported in such breadth.

Since its rise in the early 2000s, the sharing economy has expanded and developed rapidly worldwide. While the sharing economy can boost resource-use efficiency and encourage sustainable urban living, it also challenges urban governance. Recently, a collaborative governance (CG) approach involving public and private partnerships has been adopted in various global cities to address these governance dilemmas. However, the influence of stakeholder power relations on the CG of the sharing economy remains inadequately explored in the literature. This article argues that multi-actor collaboration can be enhanced by clarifying how power relations shape effective governance, actor engagement, shared motivation, and capacity for joint actions. This article draws on practical insights by discussing examples of the governance practices of urban bike-sharing programs to demonstrate how the nature of public-private power relations can result in specific (and quite different) forms of CG. This article will help CG researchers, policymakers, urban planners, and communities understand CG practices in the new era of shared cities and global cities.

Urban transformative capacities can be strengthened through the role of intermediaries, who are individuals or organisations that work between agencies and identify ways to form coalitions and broker knowledge, drive reforms across scales, and address power disparities. There is limited research to date to understand the factors that enable or limit the role of intermediaries in urban sustainability transformations. Through comparing the roles of intermediaries and their evolution in two case studies cities of urban Cambodia – Battambang and Sihanoukville – through the lens of the urban transformative capacities’ framework of Wolfram (Cities 51: 121–130, 2016), we have identified key factors that impact the effectiveness of these intermediaries. Through qualitative interviews and focus groups, we have found that long-term, place-based, and networked engagement, with political trust and support, is important, alongside the need to demonstrate results and build momentum for transformation through pilots and collaboration. Underpinning these factors are the local power dynamics and structural conditions, as well as the capabilities and attributes of the intermediary actors. Science highlights • A socio-political enabling environment is needed for intermediaries to play an active and trusted role in strengthening transformative capacities through knowledge brokering, forming coalitions, driving reforms and addressing power disparities. • The effectiveness of intermediaries in strengthening transformative capacities depends on their independent and long-term engagement, as well as their placed-based knowledge and networks that enable them to build trust and relationships. • Once intermediaries are established in a city, their successful delivery of capacity-strengthening projects can build momentum and sustain transformations .

Over the past decade there has been increasing research on how sporting mega-events such as the Olympic and Commonwealth Games are developing strategies, norms and rules to govern how they impact the host nation, city and communities, and in particular their impacts on economic, social, physical, human and cultural capital. This paper addresses a gap within these interconnected fields by examining how the strategies, norms and rules used to govern a mega-event may impact the social and physical capitals of communities in the host city during and following a mega-event. These associations are revealed through a novel methodology that combines the Institutional Grammar Tool developed by Crawford and Ostrom and the Community Capitals Framework devised by Flora and Flora, to analyse policy documentation, complemented by 11 in-depth interviews on the refurbishment of the Broadbeach Lawn Bowls Club as a venue for the 2018 Commonwealth Games in the City of Gold Coast, Australia.

Research examining human experiences of environmental contamination highlights the significance of place in influencing responses. However, a dearth of information exists on how indoor contamination affects experiences of living with legacies of land and groundwater pollution. This paper addresses this shortfall by drawing on evidence derived from an online survey, 10 semi-structured interviews, and a focus group to examine factors associated with lifescape change in home environments. The findings suggest that perceptions of the visibility and transferability of contaminants, and whether such contaminants are located in either indoor or outdoor domestic spaces, influence residents’ experiences, in turn. Through its focus on interactions between people and pollution, this article makes an original contribution to research on the spatial dynamics of individuals’ experiences with contamination. In concluding, this paper highlights the need for public health communication to provide clear guidance aimed at reducing feelings of uncertainty within domestic spheres.

While the regulation of commercial sex in the city has traditionally involved formal policing, recent shifts in many jurisdictions have seen sex premises of various kinds granted formal recognitionvia planning, licensing and environmental control. This means that 'sexual entertainment venues’, 'brothels' and 'sex shops' are now not just labels applied to particular types of premises, but formal categories of legal land use. However, these categories are not clear-cut, and it is not simply the case that changes in the law instantiate a change whereby these premises are brought into being at a particular point in time. Countering the privileging of space over time that is apparent within much contemporary research on sex and the city, this paper foregrounds the varied temporalities in play here, and describes how the actions of those policy-makers, municipal bureaucrats and officers allow sex premises to variously 'fade in', accelerate, linger, or disappear as legal land uses within the city. We examine the implications of these different temporalities of the law by exploring how sex premises have been subject to regulation in London and Sydney, showing that the volatile, contradictory and fractured nature of legal space-making does not necessarily provide the certainty sought by the law but produces overlapping and contested understandings of what types of premises should be subject to regulation. More broadly the paper highlights how attention to the contingency and complexity of municipal law can help usbetter understand the ways that commercial sex is differently manifest in different cities.

In this paper we focus on the deployment of certain techniques that are central to municipal law's attempt to impose order on the city, namely, development control, zoning, and change of use regulation. Drawing on the notion of inter‐legality, we argue that such practices can never be consistent or universal, and instead need to be sufficiently pliable to recognise the diversity of legal norms, assumptions and practices evident in a multicultural city. We demonstrate this with reference to the resolution of urban land‐use conflict in Sydney (Australia) showing how planning decisions have need to demonstrate flexibility within the law to achieve outcomes that are sensitive to local contingency and informed by notions of spatial justice. In conclusion we suggest that attempts to make municipal law more consistent or unified are problematic given situated discretion is required to produce cities more open to difference and diversity.

A physician seeks respite from the injustice of US care delivery but encounters familiar signals of system failure abroad.A physician seeks respite from the injustice of US care delivery but encounters familiar signals of system failure abroad.