And to add to Steve's points, a recent piece in the Lancet by Todd Meyers and Nancy Rose Hunt linking Detroit and its structural drivers of inequality/illness into the broader global health debate: http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736%2814%2962270-4.pdf Best wishes Clare Dr Clare Herrick Senior Lecturer in Human Geography Undergraduate Admissions Tutor Department of Geography King's College London Strand London WC2R 2LS Telephone: 02078481735 *************************************************************** http://www.theimpactinitiative.net/project/alcohol-control-poverty-and-development-south-africa www.alcoholsouthafrica.wordpress.com *************************************************************** Follow KCL Geography on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/KCLGEOGRAPHY *************************************************************** Office hours: Mondays 1-2pm and Tuesdays 9-10am From: A forum for critical and radical geographers [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Steven Cummins Sent: 04 February 2016 15:34 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: Detroit piece... Hi all An interesting read about one policy response to infant mortality but nonetheless ignores 30 years of US (and international) health disparities research about structural, social and environmental determinants of health, the so called causes of the causes. See here for an early article by Link & Phelan (1995): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7560851 You may be interested to know that researchers at the Michigan universities (MSU, UM etc) have been working in this area for a long time (since at least the early 1990s) primarily through the Detroit Community-Academic Urban Research Centrer http://www.detroiturc.org/ but also through many other departments/schools. The DURC has a focus on the structural determinants of health and has been very effective with working with many community organisations. I don't disagree with critique of the specific policy mentioned in the blog post but it implies that a focus on tackling the causes of the causes is absent in Detroit. This is not the case, as there are many organisations that work on the structural determinants of health in Detroit (and wider MI) and the reduction of health inequalities eg: http://www.healthequitymi.com/ Best wishes Steve -- Steven Cummins MSc PhD Professor of Population Health Department of Social & Environmental Health Research London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine 15-17 Tavistock Place London WC1H 9SH T: +44 0207 927 2741 (direct) F: +44 0207 927 2701 E: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> W: http://www.lshtm.ac.uk/aboutus/people/cummins.steven >>> "Jones, John P - (jpjones)" <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> 04/02/2016 00:39 >>> Colleagues, Urbanists and others interested in Detroit might want to see this recent piece by my colleague Monica Capser, which just appeared in the online magazine, metropolitiques. http://www.metropolitiques.eu/When-Cities-Fail-Babies-Die.html Best wishes. ---- John Paul Jones III Dean, College of Social and Behavioral Sciences Professor, School of Geography and Development University of Arizona