The street as transdisciplinary infrastructure: real world labs in One Urban Health—well-being corner shops in Québec, Canada

Urban environments are places where challenges and opportunities associated with One Health happen. After briefly describing the evolution of cities and urban planning, and the One Health context, the piece seeks a heuristic to focus on particular issues at their interface: One Urban Health. The concept of One Urban Health is defined as an integrated, unifying approach that recognises the pivotal role of urban cultural, social and physical environments to sustainably balance and optimize the health of ecosystems, animal and plant communities, and individual humans, their groups and communities equitably. It recognizes that health and wellbeing of humans, domestic and wild animals, plants, and the wider environment (including ecosystems) are closely linked and networked and inter-dependent intergenerationally, socially and institutionally. Out of a potential myriad issues, populations, places and phenomena this paper identifies a place-based governance perspective for One Urban Health. The governance gaze applied here is multi-level governance, a pre-condition for effective (one urban health) policy making. The particular urban place where governance across and for human and ecological health communities is established is the street: both a location, a connection, and a meaning. This aligns with a number of traditions in urban health planning, including street-level bureaucracy and street science. A natural sequel, then, is the identification of nucleation entities and phenomena (things that are the nucleus of change) that are characterised as 'Real World Laboratories'. In the Québecois context, these would achieve the shape of Well-Being Corner Shops ('Dépanneurs de Recherche') or urban socio-ecological development nuclei.