As part of the Edge 50 list, Apolitical is publishing a series of articles exploring a selection of these bold initiatives to learn more about the stories and strategies behind them.

Created by Apolitical in partnership with the Mohammed Bin Rashid Centre for Government Innovation, this list is an invitation to look beyond the usual playbook and ask what becomes possible when governments are willing to think boldly about today’s biggest problems.

Apolitical spoke with Tolullah Oni, Clinical Professor at the University of Cambridge and Founder of UrbanBetter, an African-led movement that equips young people to act as citizen scientists, capturing real-time urban 'vital signs' to help redesign healthier urban systems.

Most health systems treat illness; UrbanBetter asks what it would take to prevent it. By treating cities as patients rather than just contexts, it reframes urban planning as preventive medicine, putting the people who live in cities at the centre of the diagnosis. In Lagos, young citizen scientists found that air pollution fell by 60% when roads were closed during a city marathon, evidence that helped secure a government commitment to non-motorised transport infrastructure.

UrbanBetter focuses on treating a city like a patient. Where did that analogy come from, and how has it changed the way that you approach challenges in urban health?

The analogy came from my training. I'm a medical doctor, and I was taught to listen to patients, look for patterns, connect symptoms to underlying causes and look for ways to intervene early before disease progresses. You talk about the human body as a complex adaptive system, where different parts are connected and where something that happens in one part shapes other aspects.

Similarly, I noticed that patients were coming into my clinic and presenting with preventable issues that were coming from the environment. So I started asking how we could intervene earlier and realised that those urban problems were very similar to complex chronic conditions. That led me to begin thinking about how cities operate like the human body, with interacting organs that function as an urban physiological system. Transport networks, food systems, energy infrastructure and public spaces all shape the way people move, their diet, the heat they’re exposed to and the air they breathe. When those systems are poorly designed, we see predictable downstream effects on health, rising non-communicable diseases and reduced economic productivity.

So rather than focusing on hospitals and clinics, what if we saw the built environment as the patient? What diagnostics would we run? What are the treatments? How do we intervene to prevent disease through design?

These questions reframe urban planning, transport and climate as preventive health interventions and crucially, position cities not only as the patient but also as the medicine.

Thinking about cities as systems, who needed to be involved for this initiative to work, and why are they important?

When I started thinking about diagnostics across sectors, I first realised that the data we needed wasn’t there. When you think of health data, you usually think of healthcare data and disease data. But it’s very difficult to connect the impact of a new neighbourhood development to the health of the population when air pollution data sits in one place, connectivity data in another and the energy or health data sit somewhere else entirely.

The second thing I realised is that who measures the data matters. There's a fallacy that data is objective, but data is actually framed by the question and by the person asking it. I began to notice that the people on the front lines of exposure to health risks had data through their lived experience, but that wasn’t recognised as data. We were measuring for them rather than with them. And so that became one of my realisations: that lived experience was a critical part of that diagnostic data. Which is why we started moving more towards citizen science and the role of communities and young people in particular.

We focus on young people because this is their future, and they stand to live the longest with the consequences of decisions being taken today. Yet they are often treated only as beneficiaries rather than co-producers of solutions in a more institutionalised way.

You've said the problem isn't just a lack of data but a lack of infrastructure to sustain action. What does that infrastructure look like?

So I established UrbanBetter as a first-of-its-kind, Africa-led global Institute that is building the civic and intellectual infrastructure to activate a youth-powered movement and leadership pipeline, enabling earlier and healthier climate action in cities with urgency, equity, and legitimacy. We work as a scalable ecosystem that leverages diaspora to equip and connect young people with the skills, evidence and pathways to connect lived experience to decision-making and to generate solutions across sectors that shape healthier, climate-resilient urban futures.

There are three parts to that. The first is democratising knowledge generation so that lived-experience data becomes part of city diagnostics and is policy legible. The second is embedding that data within government workflows, because if young people collect data that doesn't align with planning cycles, reporting processes or policy mandates, it's very difficult to integrate it. The third is what I call ‘coalition infrastructure’. These are convening spaces where data and insights can connect with policy windows and decision makers. For example, in Lagos, using the civic infrastructure of UrbanBetter’s Cityzens initiative, young people (Cityzens) led an effort to collect data on air quality during the city marathon. On previous marathon days, the air pollution was significantly lower, and residents had reported feeling better. Data collected during the marathon showed that air pollution fell by 60% when roads were closed. This time, rather than relying on anecdotal evidence, residents used the UrbanBetter Cityzens citizen science app and mobile sensors to capture air quality data and distill that insight into a brief. They then identified that the state's governor had recently approved a transport policy that included provisions for walking and cycling infrastructure. This allowed them to identify who to engage with and how they could be a part of shaping change. The city was probably going to do this work at some point, but surfacing the demand gave the city government legitimacy to act more forcefully and make certain decisions.

Off the back of this, there’s now a collaboration between the Transport Agency, the Lagos Cityzens Hub and the UrbanBetter Academy@Cambridge (the diaspora-based part of the UrbanBetter ecosystem’s intellectual infrastructure at the University of Cambridge that is positioned to support Cityzens and city leaders with research, capabilities strengthening and coalition building) to design and test heat interventions around transport hubs to reduce extreme heat exposure for people walking and cycling near those spaces. All of this wouldn’t have been possible without young people who were equipped and had the infrastructure to collect that data, surface the issue and be part of shaping the solution.

You said that a critical factor in building sustainable infrastructure is ensuring that lived-experience data is embedded in government workflows. Could you say a little more about how to actually achieve that?

So we train our Cityzens in what we call a ‘precision advocacy model’ which teaches them how to ask the right question (informed by their experiences or existing data or policy priorities), collect the data, generate insights, map the key stakeholders working in these areas and look for spaces where they can share the data-informed insights and solutions, rather than just sending an email and saying “these are our findings”. I remember one young person saying, “The first time we went to an event, we tried to engage the city government folk, but they didn’t pay us much mind. Next time around, we were able to build the relationships because we had identified people within those sectors whose work this would support, rather than getting them to do something that wasn’t on their priority list.”

You've spoken about the concept of ‘anticipatory leadership’ in the past. What is it and why is it important?

When we began working with young people, we saw that they were highly motivated and understood the risks they faced, but they lacked the tools to shape solutions. That’s not just in terms of engagement, but the ability to imagine credible alternative futures that raise the ambition of what’s possible.

We also realised many of the young people we worked with were already in positions of influence. Some were teachers, some worked in government, some in planning departments or industry. Equipping them with anticipatory capabilities means those institutions also gain foresight capabilities. So we're now converting the training into a train-the-trainer guide through the UrbanBetter Academy called ‘Engage, Anticipate, Transform (EAT) for Sustainable Urban Transformation’. Through this, we’re aiming to accelerate the uptake of these methods so that this capability becomes easily embedded across sectors, whether that’s public or private.

You’ve said hope is not just an emotion but something that can be designed. What do you mean by that?

That’s one of my favourite topics because I think that hope is such a critical part of sustaining engagement. Years ago, I asked a resilience officer what they thought the biggest resilience risk was in their city. I thought it’d be something like extreme heat or flooding, but they said it was the disenfranchisement of young people. Hope is often described in a passive way, almost like wishful thinking. But philosophy and psychology describe it as an action-oriented concept. I now frame hope as a verb. For me, hope is the combination of three things. First, a belief in a desired future; an informed confidence that the future is plausible. Second, that you have the agency and skills to act towards it. Third, tangible pathways to shape that future.

If you’re interested, I’ve recently published an article, ‘Activating urban infrastructure for health: A hope framework for health and planetary resilience’, which discusses this approach for cultivating hope as infrastructure in more detail.

For a city leader who wants to try something similar, what advice would you give?

First, start with a cross-sector problem that no single department can solve. For example, the rising obesity epidemic is not a single-sector problem. It’s not just a healthcare problem; it’s actually also a food system and an urban mobility problem because that’s what shapes how people move and their ability to be physically active and eat healthily. Second, build structured feedback loops so that lived experience data regularly informs decisions. Infrastructure should allow communities to surface issues rather than governments asking occasionally for input. Third, equip people to contribute meaningfully. If you want insights from young people or communities, they need tools like systems thinking, futures literacy and data skills. Otherwise, it's very convenient to say, “Oh we asked them and they just didn't say anything”. Fourth is around critical pathways to engage, because when people share their insights and they don't see how it contributes to decisions, you erode trust. Even tiny instances of where things shift as a result of those insights send a powerful signal that you're not just engaging as a tickbox exercise.

Finally, identify opportunities to act. Often, when people talk about innovation, they talk about the technical, but I think innovation is very relational. So build those pathways for action and ensure that people can see their futures being built and understand how they can shape them. It’s not always all-or-nothing – redesigning a whole system – but can start with that cross-sector priority, one partnership and one feedback loop.