Protocol for a meta-narrative review on research paradigms addressing the urban built environment and human health

How to Achieve a Healthy City: a Scoping Review with Ten City Examples

This scoping review of the literature explores the following question: what systematic measures are needed to achieve a healthy city? The World Health Organization (WHO) suggests 11 characteristics of a healthy city. Measures contributing to these characteristics are extracted and classified into 29 themes. Implementation of some of these measures is illustrated by examples from Freiburg, Greater Vancouver, Singapore, Seattle, New York City, London, Nantes, Exeter, Copenhagen, and Washington, DC. The identified measures and examples indicate that a healthy city is a system of healthy sectors. A discussion section suggests healthy directions for nine sectors in a healthy city. These sectors include transportation, housing, schools, city planning, local government, environmental management, retail, heritage, and healthcare. Future work is advised to put more focus on characteristic 5 (i.e., the meeting of basic needs for all the city's people) and characteristic 10 (i.e., public health and sick care services accessible to all) of a healthy city.

Five urban health research traditions: A meta-narrative review

Urban health scholars explore the connection between the urban space and health through ontological perspectives that are shaped by their disciplinary traditions. Without explicit recognition of the different approaches, there are barriers to collaboration. This paper maps the terrain of the urban health scholarship to identify key urban health research traditions; and to articulate the main features distinguishing these different traditions. We apply a meta-narrative review guided by a bibliometric co-citation network analysis to the body of research on urban health retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection. Five urban health research traditions were identified: (1) sustainable urban development, (2) urban ecosystem services, (3) urban resilience, (4) healthy urban planning, and (5) urban green spaces. Each research tradition has a different conceptual and thematic perspective to addressing urban health. These include perspectives on the scale of the urban health issue of interest, and on the conceptualisation of the urban context and health. Additionally, we developed a framework to allow for better differentiation between the differing research traditions based on (1) perspectives of the urban system as complicated or complex, (2) the preferred locus of change as a function of structure and agency and (3) the geographic scale of the urban health issue that is addressed. These dimensions have even deeper implications for transdisciplinary collaboration as they are underpinned by paradigmatic differences, rather than disciplinary differences. We conclude that it is essential for urban health researchers to reflect on the different urban health approaches and seek coherence by understanding their similarities and differences. Such endeavours are required to produce and interpret transdisciplinary knowledge for the goal of improving health by transforming urban systems.

Willingness to Pay for Healthy Housing During the COVID-19 Pandemic in China: Evidence From Eye-Tracking Experiment

Healthy housing can set its occupants completely in good physical, mental and social conditions, but there is a lack of research in China on the public's willingness to pay (WTP) for healthy housing. From the perspective of cognitive psychology, this study constructs an analytical framework based on the model of "theory of planned behavior" (TPB), the theory of selective information exposure, and the model of "emotions as social information," while exploring the effect mechanism of the online reviews on the public's WTP for healthy housing during COVID-19 pandemic. In combination with eye-tracking experiments and subjective reports, physiological, psychological and behavioral multimodal data on WTP of 65 participants for healthy housing are collected. Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) is adopted to analyze the formation effect mechanism of the public's WTP for healthy housing. This study acquires the following results: (i) Information attentiveness to online reviews on different valence information of healthy housing as obtained in eye tracking experiments delivers significant effect on attitude, subjective norm (SN) and perceived behavioral control (PBC), but has no direct effect on the public's WTP for healthy housing; (ii) Hypotheses from TPB model are verified. attitude, PBC and SN can all make significant effect on WTP for healthy housing, with attitude showcasing the most prominent effect; and (iii) In terms of the mediating effect, information attentiveness can deliver significant indirect effect on WTP through attitude.