A new OUP journal connecting health and infrastructure

A new OUP journal connecting health and infrastructure

This week sees the launch of our new journal, Infrastructure and Health: Big Connections for Wellbeing, or OOIH for short. 

Humanity strives to and achieves progress through infrastructure. Infrastructure provides the hardware, tools, and services for a connected and functioning planet. Those connections are not just for humans but whole ecosystems. But the world faces challenges that require infrastructure to be bold in scope and ambition, dynamic and adaptive, and full of vision and aspiration. Ecological devastation, climate justice, health inequity, compounded by popular distrust in politics and institutions, has cemented the need for infrastructure that covers all dynamics, human and environmental, between the planetary and nano-particle. Above all, the new era of the Anthropocene requires infrastructure that emphasises big connections for wellbeing. 

OOIH provides a new unique scholarly and policy platform and outlet that has never been more urgent. Connections between big boundary spanning ideas like the Sustainable Development Goals are foundational. Links across sectors and disciplines is the journal’s necessary function. And above all, our aim for OOIH is to challenge the status quo to be bolder, better, innovative, adaptive and accountable. 

Supporting the launch are three foundational articles. An introduction to the journal by us as Editors in Chief, a response to our introduction by editorial board member Prof Phil McManus, and reflections on the political nature of infrastructure from editorial board member, Toks Omishakin (the Secretary of the California State Transport Agency). 

Read the OOIH articles:

• “Infrastructure and Health: laying down the big connections for wellbeing” by Dr Patrick Harris and Prof Evelyne De Leeuw
• “Infrastructure, health and urban planning: Rethinking the past and exploring future possibilities as a response to Harris and De Leeuw” by Prof Phil McManus
• “The Built Environment, People at Its Axis” by Toks Omishakin

The journal is accepting submissions year-round. We expect to have four editions per year made up of a mix of article types. As per instructions to authors, original research, reviews, reflections and visually based “narrative” pieces are welcome. If you have a novel idea to progress the field, we are keen to hear from you before commissioning Editorials.

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