Four For Friday | Oct 3, 2025
LF190 | WHO seen urban design as healthcare, systems and ecosystems, healthy Sweden, science or slop + Sora 2
Welcome to this week’s Four For Friday - nuggets of interesting things I’ve picked up this week. Enjoy!
1. WHO on urban planning as healthcare
A new WHO technical brief lays out a powerful case that land use planning is one of the most critical public health tools we have. With cities producing 80% of global emissions and only one in ten meeting WHO air quality standards, urban design is literally a matter of life and death.
The inequities are jarring. Poorer communities sit next to highways and industrial sites, while wealthier neighborhoods enjoy tree-lined streets and green buffers. But the brief showcases what’s possible when cities prioritize health.
In Barcelona, the “superblock” model has reclaimed streets from cars, cutting nitrogen dioxide by 25% and potentially preventing hundreds of premature deaths annually. In Barranquilla, Colombia, over 700,000 square meters of new green space now gives nearly every resident park access within an eight-minute walk.
The So What? Our urban infrastructure is a more powerful health determinant than many medical interventions, and should be considered as such.
2. Every System an Ecosystem?
This piece argues that rather than teaching engineers systems thinking we should be teaching them ‘ecosystems thinking’. This is because you can optimize closed systems without accounting for their impact on people and planet.
This gives us externalities and unintended consequences: an AI model that requires 100 bottles of water to generate a 100-word email, or an electric vehicle supply chain that damages communities.
Hudda says systems change doesn’t need to be glacial - Norway’s EV penetration of new cars went from 50% to 90% in seven years, and the palm oil industry rapidly shifted towards transparency. These successes came from coordinated, ecosystem-level approaches that brought together the right stakeholders.
The So What? We need to expand our definition of “system” to include the messy, interconnected web of social and environmental factors.
3. Visit Sweden, doctor’s orders
A great find by Rajiv on how countries could start to capture their benefits of their healthy ecosystems. This fun piece by Sweden’s tourist office makes the case that we should be urging our doctors to prescribe a visit. Given doctors are now prescribing social determinants of health interventions, why not? Next up… Bali, New Zealand..?
4. Science or Slop: Where’s AI going?
An existential - and trillion dollar - debate about whether AI is going to be able to make science breakthroughs, or just regurgitate stuff in its training data.
Hugging Face co-founder, Thomas Wolf’s argument is that current AI models are designed to “predict the most likely next word,” making them excellent at summarizing and explaining, but not coming up with new breakthroughs. Nobel Prize-winning science has never been about predicting the most likely thing. It’s about predicting the “surprisingly unlikely” thing that turns out to be true.
This resonates for me - I’ve got tired of my LLMs being so agreeable - and have asked them to tougher and more critical and push me harder.
The So What? Neither slop nor genius, today’s AI creates powerful tools, but for now society will benefit most from them elevating humans, not replacing them.
Bonus AI Tip of the Week: Sora App
Open AI just released their Sora video maker app and Sora 2 model. The app requires an invite code to access, but the cameo feature is remarkable - it lets you give permission for other people to make videos of you. Seems that CEO Sam is getting into the spirit of things
That’s all for now - happy weekend everyone.
- Stephen