Author name: Gabriel M. Filippelli

Cities are typically evaluated by metrics involving transportation, energy, and economics, but increasingly, environmental quality and human health are becoming important indicators of safe and habitable cities. Population density and industrialization history have resulted in urban contaminant legacies that can impact the health of urban populations. Integrating environmental assessment with human exposure and health studies is in its infancy, but combined geospatial and geotemporal studies have the capacity to explain and predict the health of urban environments. Studies integrating metal geochemistry with human health impacts reveal the complicated layering of environment, exposure, uptake, and human health in cities, and they call for more effort towards the integration of Earth and health science data.

Modern cities are affected by multiple sources of contamination and pollution, the effects of which overlap in space and time. Toxic metal contamination, organic pollution, smog, acid rain, and greenhouse gas accumulation are the most widespread legacies of an often uncontrolled growth that has deeply changed the geochemical character of the urban environment over the last four millennia. Even though progress has changed human habits and positively influenced the quality of city life, the past is frequently a hidden source of environmental problems with the potential to affect the health of current and future urban residents.