Axes of a multidisciplinary model for sustainable innovation: Life transition after COVID-19

In the post COVID-19 era, the current sustainability model should be adjusted to the current life transition considering the lessons learned in this atypical era. The current sustainability model, which is composed of three axes: environment, economy, and society, seems insufficient. It should integrate the axes of health, from an environmental health perspective (not only anthropogenic), and legislation within a detailed analysis in the standardization towards a balanced trend in harmony with the environment. In addition, innovation is proposed as a transversal axis. Based on a detailed analysis of more than 400 published works on sustainability, this work proposes a new conceptual model centered on a multidisciplinary perspective, analyzing and integrating each of the proposed axes. This conceptual model represents a strategic correlation between each axis towards a sense of globalized benefit and an environmentally-friendly life transition, hence, respecting the health of the planet.

THE ENDURING ATLANTA COMPROMISE

Waves of migration to and flight from Atlanta by both White and Black residents and businesses have constantly imagined and re-imagined the city as both politically regressive and racially progressive, and from an environmental health perspective, as both a riskscape and a safe haven. We argue that the persistent racial, social, environmental, and health inequities in Atlanta have been fostered and exacerbated by the exponential growth of the city and the persistent rhetoric of it being “the city too busy to hate.” This paper is informed by extant research on housing and transportation policies and processes at work in Atlanta since the end of the Civil War, and in particular, the predatory and subprime lending practices during the past thirty years. This paper examines how young people, living in a neighborhood where over 50% of the houses are currently vacant and contending with threats of school closures, experience the contemporary foreclosure crisis. Using qualitative data from focus groups with middle school youth, this paper offers youth-informed perspectives and local knowledge by offering responses of marginalized populations in Atlanta who inhabit, rather than flee, their built and social environments.