Prof. Dr. Gabriele Bolte, Dr. Stefanie Dreger and Ellen Senck from the Department of Social Epidemiology at the Institute of Public Health and Nursing Research (IPP) are working together with various partners from science and practice in the InnovationCommunity Urban Health ICUH. In the old industrial urban regions of the Ruhr and Bremen/Bremerhaven, research is to be conducted into how a socio-ecological transformation can succeed and how healthy and equitable living conditions can be created in cities.
Inner-city neighborhoods in old industrial areas that are affected by environmental injustice face a variety of challenges. Unequal health opportunities, poor environmental quality and a lack of social participation often manifest themselves there. At the same time, such areas offer points of contact and specific experience in neighborhood development.
The central subject of the Urban Health Innovation Community is overcoming the “implementation gap”, i.e. the question of why scientific findings and accepted guiding principles such as sustainability, environmental justice or health-promoting urban development often cannot be implemented in practice.
The joint project is being funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) for four years as part of DATIpilot.
The IPP is carrying out the two ICUH sub-projects Management Project and Experimental Spaces together with the Bochum University of Applied Sciences, the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy gGmbH, the ILS Institute for Regional and Urban Development Research, the North Rhine-Westphalia State Center for Health and the State Association for Health and Academy for Social Medicine of Lower Saxony Bremen.
The management project aims to build an innovation community from science, practice and various communities and to accompany the transdisciplinary process with change and knowledge management.
The experimental spaces project examines barriers to implementation in urban neighborhoods affected by environmental injustice and tests innovative methods for implementing technical and social innovations for socio-ecological transformation. The aim is to derive concrete changes in funding frameworks, legal frameworks and local work processes to promote environmental justice. The focus is on climate adaptation strategies and the expansion of active mobility in selected urban districts in the state of Bremen and the Ruhr region.
Further information on ICUH projects can be found at:
Contact:
Prof. Dr. Gabriele Bolte
Institute for Public Health and Nursing Research
Department of Social Epidemiology
E-mail: gabriele.bolte@uni-bremen.de