Urban Health Inside Out

Yolande Barnes (Chair)

Yolande Barnes is Professor of Real Estate at UCL.  Yolande has been examining and analysing real estate markets from within the real estate industry since 1986. Her experience covers a wide range of asset classes including Residential, Social housing, Retail, Industrial, Offices, Hospitality, Alternative Assets like Student Housing, Senior Living, Build to rent, Co-living and Co-working. She is currently exploring issues like Third space, the Post-Covid city, hypermixity, Virtual Estate in the Metaverse and Digital Real Estate.  Yolande provides thought-leadership in real estate as well as evidence-based advice to a wide variety of clients, including private and public sector land owners, investors, developers, bankers, local authorities, government, housing associations, think tanks, management consultants, lenders and NGOs.

Julian Agyeman

Julian Agyeman is a Professor of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University. He is the originator of the increasingly influential concept of just sustainabilities, the intentional integration of social justice and environmental sustainability. He centers his research on critical explorations of the complex and embedded relations between humans and the urban environment, whether mediated by governments or social movement organizations, and their effects on public policy and planning processes and outcomes, particularly in relation to notions of justice and equity.

He believes that what our cities can become (sustainable, smart, sharing and resilient) and who is allowed to belong in them (recognition of difference, diversity, and a right to the city) are fundamentally and inextricably interlinked. We must therefore act on both belonging and becoming, together, using just sustainabilities as the anchor, or face deepening spatial and social inequities and inequalities.

He is the author or editor of 13 books, including Just Sustainabilities: Development in an Unequal World (MIT Press, 2003), Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class and Sustainability (MIT Press, 2011), and Sharing Cities: A Case for Truly Smart and Sustainable Cities (MIT Press, 2015), one of Nature’s Top 20 Books of 2015. His most recent book is Sacred Civics: Building Seven Generation Cities (Routledge 2022). In 2018, he was awarded the Athena City Accolade by KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, for his “outstanding contribution to the field of social justice and ecological sustainability, environmental policy and planning“. In November 2021, he was invited by then Boston Mayor-Elect Michelle Wu to be a Transition Advisor on her Transition Committee.

Kieron Boyle

Kieron Boyle is the Chief Executive of the family of organisations part of the south London-based philanthropic institution Guy’s & St Thomas’ Foundation. These include Impact on Urban Health, which works to unlock the potential of cities to be healthier, and the charities that support extraordinary patient and staff care at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust. Kieron also stewards the management and investment of the Foundation’s endowment portfolio, which includes a substantive proportion of land and property. Close to £1 billion, the endowment has a dual mandate of achieving both a financial return and health impact. Kieron sits on the Boards of Big Society Capital, the Design Council and Catch22. He chairs LIPH — a global coalition of institutional investors working to improve people’s health — as well as Nesta’s Cultural Impact Development Fund.

Iona O’Carroll

Iona O’Carroll lives and works in Barton, Oxford, an area considered to be in the 20% most deprived areas in England. She is employed by the City Council as Community Health Development Officer and her role in Barton has been to build on the Barton Healthy New Town legacy through building relationships with existing residents to empower people to find their own solutions to the health inequalities experienced there, and supporting people to develop their own community led programmes to remove barriers and find meaningful solutions outside of the statutory services already provided. Her work focuses on the integration of Barton with the new development of Barton Park, an 885 home extension to Barton. Iona’s background is in working with vulnerable people who have experienced challenging life circumstances and advocating for those from marginalised communities. She is a qualified social worker and has a specific interest in building collaborative communities utilising asset based community development. Iona additionally works for a community organisation called Barton Art in Nature whose aim is to immerse the local community in Art and Nature through creating a program and platform of outdoor art and growing activities and events that are powered by and for the community, providing real reasons for us all to meet, share and connect, outdoors and in nature. You can find out more about this by visiting www.bartonart.co.uk

Helen Pineo

Helen Pineo MRTPI is an urban planner and Associate Professor in Healthy and Sustainable Cities in the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment at University College London. Her research focuses on how property development, regeneration and urban policy can support health and sustainability. Helen has expertise in the development of urban health metrics and their application in policy and design processes. Her new book, Healthy Urbanism: Designing and Planning Equitable, Sustainable and Inclusive Places, redefines the meaning and form of healthy urban environments. Healthy urbanism requires planners and design professionals to consider how their work impacts population health and wellbeing at multiple spatial and temporal scales, through the interconnected concepts of equity, inclusion and sustainability.

Prior to joining UCL in 2018, Helen worked as an urban planner for over a decade on new developments and planning policy in the UK and internationally. She has worked at the Building Research Establishment, Local Government Association and in national and local government in the areas of sustainable urbanisation, health, climate change and low carbon energy. She is a Design Council Ambassador (Built Environment Expert since 2015) and a chartered member of the Royal Town Planning Institute since 2016. She holds numerous international expert advisory roles for government and industry.