Dr. Franz W. Gatzweiler studied agricultural economics at the University of Bonn and the Humboldt University of Berlin. His doctorate research was on the ‘Nature of Economic Value and the Value of Nature’. He received stipends and research grants from the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (AvH), the Volkswagen Foundation, the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research and the Käthe-Humburger Kolleg. He was research fellow at the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University, USA, established by Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom. Franz Gatzweiler has earned a habilitation (fakultas docendi) for the discipline of resource economics from the Humboldt University of Berlin. His research interests lie at the edge of ecological, economic and social sciences and have covered problems of value in complex socio-ecological, living systems, institutions and institutional change in polycentric organization, marginality and technology innovations for productivity growth in rural development. He was senior researcher at the Centre of Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn, Germany, from 2004-2014. Currently he is executive director of the ICSU-IAP-UNU sponsored global programme on ‘Urban Health and Wellbeing: a Systems Approach’, based at the Institute of Urban Environment at the Chinese Academy of Science, Xiamen, China. Gatzweiler published on ecosystem and biodiversity value, intrinsic values and the role of institutions for valuing nature. His latest books (edited volumes with Joachim von Braun) include ‘Marginality’ and ‘Technological and Institutional Innovations for Marginalized Smallholders’ both downloadable for free on Springer Open. In those books Gatzweiler develops a development theory which combines the ecosystem and capability approach for identifying unused potentials of people and natural environments. In his latest publication he develops a conceptual framework which combines the concept of human health and capabilities in order to identify pathways towards health and wellbeing in changing urban environments. In that framework health disorders in urban environments are perceived as symptoms of malfunctioning complex urban systems in which social, human, ecological, financial capital potentials are not generating value for health and wellbeing. A transdisciplinary systems approach is applied to trigger value generation in respective domains.