Los Angeles as a Site for Planetary Health

On April 12, 2024, thinkers from the Berggruen Institute, USC, UCLA, UC Irvine, King’s College London, Museum of Natural History of Los Angeles County, Pomona College, and University of Oxford explored what it means – or what it could mean – to practice planetary health in Los Angeles, a paradigmatic planetary city.

This one-day workshop co-hosted by the Berggruen Institute’s Planetary Program and USC’s Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life, “Los Angeles as a Site for Planetary Health” convened scholars and practitioners to consider emergent conceptualizations and practices of planetary health and planetary cities, using Los Angeles as a focal point for thinking about both in site-specific terms.

While proposed as early as the 1980s, term “Planetary Health” has risen to prominence since the 2015 publication of a report by the Rockefeller Foundation–Lancet Commission on Planetary Health which claimed that “the highest attainable standard of health, wellbeing, and equity worldwide” is possible only “through judicious attention to the human systems – political, economic, and social – that shape the future of humanity and the Earth’s natural systems that define the safe environmental limits within which humanity can flourish.” In this conception, human morbidities and pathogens cannot be hived off from larger systems: human flourishing is unattainable without also safeguarding multispecies flourishing.

The workshop’s hypothesis was that the concept of planetary health can be usefully enriched by encountering the concept of “planetary cities,” that is cities that are not just the creatures of their nation-states and global trade networks, but also as enmeshed in planetary-scale biogeochemical phenomena such as climate change and ecosystem disruption. This view of cities has particular implications for thinking about healthcare practices. In contrast to 19th century social milieu of the city as the key site of “public health” surveillance and control, or 20th century views of “global health” that have generally been less location specific or urban focused, planetary health returns to the urban but now views cities not as monadic sites of policy intervention but instead as imbricated components of a holistic world-spanning network of biosurveillance and health management.