Jason Corburn

Jason Corburn is professor of City and Regional Planning and of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, where he directs the Center for Global Healthy Cities. His work joins two disciplines that were born together in the nineteenth century, with sanitation and workers' housing, and that separated during the twentieth: planning and public health. His thesis is that the city is the largest determinant of health and that planning is, whether planners know it or not, deciding who gets sick.

Street Science (2005), which received the Paul Davidoff Award, studied how residents of Brooklyn's Greenpoint-Williamsburg produced knowledge about pollution, asthma and the risks of their environment that official science did not have, and argued that this local knowledge, street science, must enter environmental decisions with the same standing as that of experts. It is one of the references of environmental justice and participatory research.

Toward the Healthy City (2009) and Healthy City Planning (2013) develop healthy urban planning with cases from Richmond, California, and Nairobi, and Cities for Life (2021) gathers his work in Medellín, in Richmond and in the informal settlements of Nairobi on how urban violence and trauma are addressed from the city. He has advised the World Health Organization, and his work in the Mukuru neighbourhood of Nairobi is a reference for upgrading informal settlements with residents.

His work with the city of Richmond, California, had regulatory effects: in 2014 the city adopted a health in all policies ordinance, requiring it to assess how every decision, from housing to transport, affects residents' health. Corburn also evaluated the city's Peacemaker Fellowship programme, which works with the young people most at risk of involvement in gun violence, and presented it as evidence that safety can be approached as a public health problem.