The Microbiome of the Built Environment: The Nexus for Urban Regeneration for the Cities of Tomorrow

Abstract

Built environments are, for most of us, our natural habitat. In the last 50 years, the built-up area has more than doubled, with a massive biodiversity loss. The undeniable benefits of a city providing all the basic needs to a growing population showed longer-term and less obvious costs to human health: autoimmune and non-communicable diseases, as well as antimicrobial resistance, have reached unprecedented and alarming levels. Humans coevolved with microbes, and this long-lasting alliance is affected by the loss of connection with natural environments, misuse of antibiotics, and highly sanitized environments. Our aim is to direct the focus onto the microbial communities harbored by the built environments we live in. They represent the nexus for urban regeneration, which starts from a healthy environment. Planning a city means considering, in a two-fold way, the ecosystem health and the multidimensional aspects of wellbeing, including social, cultural, and aesthetic values. The significance of this perspective is inspiring guidelines and strategies for the urban regeneration of the cities of tomorrow, exploiting the invaluable role of microbial biodiversity and the ecosystem services that it could provide to create the robust scientific knowledge that is necessary for a bioinformed design of buildings and cities for healthy and sustainable living.

Impact of Plant–Microbe Interactions with a Focus on Poorly Investigated Urban Ecosystems—A Review

“…The MIGI model involves the introduction of vegetal, animal, and microbial species within urban and inhabited areas to increase the benefits of the ecosystem on the human immune system. Urban parks, green roofs, rain gardens, hedges, wildlife overpasses, and community gardens represent natural reservoirs of microorganisms that produce immunoregulatory molecules and are of considerable importance in urban environments [14,133].…”

“…This hypothesis suggests a link between biodiversity loss and the rapid increase in non-communicable diseases (NCDs). Lower exposure to biodiversity may cause the human immune system to be poorly trained and over-sensitive to normally harmless agents, such as dust particles and pollen [12][13][14]. Conversely, biodiverse green spaces improve human health by favoring exposure to different beneficial environmental microbes [3].…”

Aquaculture ecosystem microbiome at the water-fish interface: the case-study of rainbow trout fed with Tenebrio molitor novel diets

“…Consequently, a broader understanding of aquaculture ecosystems as holobiomes is necessary to drive the sustainability of fish and environmental health. In the realm of Global Health concepts towards sustainability in aquaculture, contemporary studies are in favor of environmental biodiversity that encourages more diverse microbiomes [ 79 , 80 ], eventually resulting in a more resilient system and healthier farmed species. Such studies will pave the way for sufficient knowledge to modulate the microbiome in artificial ecosystems.…”

Circular Health: exploiting the SDG roadmap to fight AMR

“…A growing share of humanity, about 55% in 2020, are urbanite, highlighting the importance of building sustainable cities (United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) 2020). Sustainability should include monitoring and promoting a healthy microbiome of the built environment ( Bruno et al., 2022 ) because, on one hand, it exerts selective pressures on microorganisms to develop AMR, especially in health care settings ( Tarricone et al., 2020 ; Bruno et al., 2022 ) but, on the other hand, it can also be a source of a healthy and balanced microbiome that helps city dwellers to fend off and/or control the growth of harmful microorganisms ( Tarricone et al., 2020 ). The importance of a healthy microbiome could be included in target 11.7 as another important environmental factor of sustainable and healthy cities.…”