How children experience, negotiate and connect with or resist their surroundings impacts on their health and wellbeing. In cities, various aspects of the physical and social environment can affect children’s wellbeing. This edited collection brings together different accounts and experiences of children’s health and wellbeing in urban environments from majority and minority world perspectives. Privileging children’s expertise, this timely volume explicitly explores the relationships between health, wellbeing and place. To demonstrate the importance of a place-based understanding of urban children’s health and wellbeing, the authors unpack the meanings of the physical, social and symbolic environments that constrain or enable children’s flourishing in urban environments. Drawing on the expertise of geographers, educationists, anthropologists, psychologists, planners and public health researchers, as well as nurses and social workers, this book, above all, sees children as the experts on their experiences of the issues that affect their wellbeing. Children’s Health and Wellbeing in Urban Environments will be fascinating reading for anyone with an interest in cultural geography, urban geography, environmental geography, children’s health, youth studies or urban planning.

Overcrowding, noise and air pollution, long commutes and lack of daylight can take a huge toll on the mental well-being of city-dwellers. With mental healthcare services under increasing pressure, could a better approach to urban design and planning provide a solution? The restrictions faced by city residents around the world during the COVID-19 pandemic has brought home just how much urban design can affect our mental health – and created an imperative to seize this opportunity. Restorative Cities explores a new way of designing cities, one which places mental health and wellness at the forefront. Establishing a blueprint for urban design for mental health, it examines a range of strategies – from sensory architecture to place-making for creativity and community – and brings a genuinely evidence-based approach that will appeal to designers and planners, health practitioners and researchers alike - and provide compelling insights for anyone who cares about how our surroundings affect us. Written by a psychiatrist and public health specialist, and an environmental psychologist with extensive experience of architectural practice, this much-needed work will prompt debate and inspire built environment students and professionals to think more about the positive potential of their designs for mental well-being.

In recent years there has been a growing body of evidence from fields such as public health, architecture, ecology, landscape, forestry, psychology, sport science, psychiatry, geography suggesting that nature enhances psychological health and wellbeing. Physical activity in the presence of nature, feelings of connection to nature, engagement with nature, specific environmental features (e.g. therapeutic, water and trees) and images of real and virtual nature have all been posited as important wellbeing facilitators. Thus, the association between natural environments and health outcomes might be more complex than initially understood (Pritchard, Richardson, Sheffield, & Mcewan, 2019). Despite the number of studies showing improvements in psychological health and wellbeing through nature-based physical activities or feelings of connection to nature the exact role and influence of the natural environment in this process is still rather unclear (Brymer, Davids, & Mallabon, 2014; Karmanov & Hamel, 2008). Research is also beginning to consider the importance of individual differences, meaning and the person-environment relationship (Freeman, Akhurst, Bannigan & James, 2016; Freeman & Akhurst, 2015) in the development of wellbeing and health outcomes. Furthermore traditional theoretical notions, such as Biophilia, topophilia, restoration theories and stress reduction theories typically used to interpret findings are also being critiqued. Often one of the main barriers for practitioners is the vast array of theories that claim to effectively explain research findings but that tend to be only partially relevant (e.g. for Physical activity or restoration), focus on the characteristics of the person (e.g. nature relatedness) and only some features of the landscape (e.g. therapeutic landscapes). This special edition therefore brings together cutting edge ideas and research from a wide set of disciplines with the purpose of exploring interdisciplinary or trans-disciplinary approaches to understanding the psychological health and wellbeing benefits of human-nature interactions.

This book assembles a wide range of explanatory perspectives on social inequalities in health. Everywhere in the world, those with less advantage die younger and suffer more illness than the wealthy. Decades of research have documented this reality and yet we lack a comprehensive understanding of the mechanisms through which social circumstances ultimately influence the biological processes that lead to disease. Explanations have been proposed from various disciplines – economics, psychology, behavioral science, geography, and neuroscience – and each sheds light on parts of the overall process. But very few texts assemble these insights into an overall explanatory paradigm. Through a review of concepts and theories from a wide range of disciplines, the author outlines how these may be woven together to offer a more complete picture of how social influences 'get under the skin' to affect health and disease. As well as understanding individual health, the book assembles explanations for social disparities in health. It concludes with a proposal for a set of explanatory models that cross disciplinary boundaries. Topics explored include: Social Inequalities in Health Explanation and Causal Models for Social Epidemiology Social and Economic Theories to Explain Patterns of Disease Biological Pathways Linking Social Determinants to Health Theoretical Models of Health Behavior Work Environment and Health Social Networks, Social Support and Health Positive Influences on Health: Coping and Control The Relationship Between Personality and Health Understanding Health Determinants: Explanatory Theories for Social Epidemiology is a textbook for graduate students in epidemiology, health sciences, health policy, and psychology, as well as social science students who are studying health. It will also be of interest to general readers, and can serve as a reference for researchers in epidemiology and the health sciences who are planning studies of the social determinants of health. The book reviews theories that could be tested in such studies.

Now more than ever, there is a need to be working together across disciplines and across oceans to understand, tackle and overcome some of the greatest global challenges of human history – climate change and the impact on planetary and human wellbeing (One Health), and the global mental health crisis which is being exacerbated by Covid-19. There is a vital need to improve people’s connection to nature and improve pro-environmental behavior.

This book is a collection of papers reflecting the latest advances in geographic research on health, disease, and well-being. It spans a wide range of topics, theoretical perspectives, and methodologies - including anti-racism, post-colonialism, spatial statistics, spatiotemporal modeling, political ecology, and social network analysis. Health issues in various regions of the world are addressed by interdisciplinary authors, who include scholars from epidemiology, medicine, public health, demography, and community studies. The book covers the major themes in this field such as health inequalities; environmental health; spatial analysis and modeling of disease; health care provision, access, and utilization; health and wellbeing; and global/transnational health and health issues in the global south. There is also a specially commissioned book review in addition to the chapters included in these six sections. Together, these chapters show cogently how geographic perspectives and methods can contribute in significant ways to advancing our understanding of the complex interactions between social and physical environments and health behaviors and outcomes. This book was published as a special issue of Annals of the Association of American Geographers.