Urbanicity, referring to the impact of living in urban areas at a given time (Vlahov & Galea, 2002), has been studied extensively to understand the supposed associations between itself and mental health issues such as depression (Howden, 2019; Pun et al., 2018); schizophrenia (Krabbendam & Os, 2005; Plana-Ripoll et al., 2018); and psychosis (Coid et al., 2018; Fett et al., 2019). The urbanicity studies in existing research was measured through varied features of urban density, sprawl and strategy such as population density, net residential density, land use types, accessibility by public transport and accessibility to services, green and public spaces.
Urbanicity can be considered alongside the urbanisation and urban regeneration of towns and cities to understand the effects of change to the urban build-up of on individuals and their mental health and being. In areas of large scale regeneration, such as the centre of Newcastle which is set to undertake its biggest investment into highways for over 30 years (Re-newcastle, 2020) as part of the wider plans for the future of the city’s Urban Core, it is important to understand the associations between regenerative urbanisation and mental health to ensure that individuals will not be negatively affected by such developments. It is important that future studies should exclude bias to allow findings to offer suggestions for future council policy and strategy regarding regeneration, to ensure policy makers are aware of the associations between regeneration and mental health and wellbeing.
With the most rapidly urbanising cities being in less-wealthy nations (Vlahov, 2002) examining research papers from multiple nations provides insights into how urbanisation influences individuals’ mental health and well-being. The varied results of previous case studies into the associations between urbanicity and mental health conditions suggests heterogeneity of the populations dependant on the social environment of each country that the case studies were conducted (Coid et al., 2018). Increases in urban density have also been related to individuals being ‘less physically and socially active’ (Pun et al., 2018). However, the association between urban density and employment has in some countries, such as China where rapid economic development is underpinned by urbanisation, lead to a positive association between urban development and mental health. Due to the impact of the social environment on the association of urban development and mental health conditions, it is important that studies adjust variables which may be statistically significant for all individual characteristics (Melis et al., 2015).
Multivariable models suggest that demographic factors can also impact which urban structure indicators influence mental health. Melis et al. (2015) concluded that amongst men, accessibility by public transport and urban density were only seen to increase the risk of mental health of those over 50, whereas women were more at risk at all ages if public transport accessibility was poor, and were only affected by urban density over the age of 50.
Comments