Abstract:In cities, social well-being faces obstacles posed by globalization, demographic and climate change, new forms of social organization, and the fragmentation of lifestyles. These changes affect the vulnerability of city societies and impact their health-related urban well-being (UrbWellth). The conceptual model introduced in this paper systematizes the relevant variables while considering previous research, and establishes the target value UrbWellth. The model differs from existing approaches mainly in the analytical distinctions it suggests. These allow us to group the relevant urban influence variables into four sectors and enable a more general and abstract consideration of health-related urban relations. The introduction of vulnerability as a filter and transfer function acts as an effect modifier between UrbWellth and the various urban variables.

Living in cities offers many benefits and thus more and more people are living in urban areas. However, the concentration of human activities also creates environmental stressors with severe influence on people's health and well-being. Noise is an environmental stressor with known health impact. Despite this, studies investigating small-scale difference in noise exposure and annoyance are lacking. Against this background, this case study investigates environmental justice empirically, focusing on the distribution of road traffic noise and its perception in Hamburg, Germany. The study outlines a methodological approach that takes into account subjective and objective measures of exposure in small-scale residential blocks. The results show that annoyance by noise is clearly related to noise emission. Moreover, different groups are affected by noise pollution in our study area unequally. In particular, younger people and people with lower socio-economic status have higher probabilities to be affected by noise. Additionally, it emerged that participants reporting higher levels of annoyance from noise are on average younger than those feeling less annoyed. Overall, these results show that the current legal noise limits applicable to residential planning processes in German cities are not sufficient to prevent substantial annoyance effects in residential populations.

The objective of this first part of our study was to investigate associations of road traffic noise, socioeconomic and -demographic risk factors, and health access on depression on borough level.We investigated in a large metropolis associations between prevalence rates of depression per borough (n = 67 boroughs) in all age groups (excluding the age group of 0-17 years) using health claims data (year 2011) and the variables "social deprivation" and "number of family members", which were obtained from a previously conducted principal component analysis, and by using multivariate regression model. Additionally, the proportion of borough area affected by noise > 65 db(A) and physician density used as a surrogate parameter for health access were considered as potentially associated factors for depression.The results demonstrated that depression might be associated with increasing social borough deprivation.Additionally, the number of family members used as a proxy measure for positive family support showed decreasing prevalence rates the more family members were present. Furthermore, proportions of borough areas affected by noise > 65 db(A) was positively associated with depression.Our ecological study design has the advantage that a large number of large-scale, population-based aggregated data could easily be obtained and analysed and first potential associations could be found and discussed. To improve our findings, future studies will use data from a survey and data from the Hamburg City Health Study, a local follow-up health study, to better elucidate the individual risk factors together with environmental living and working conditions.

Worldwide, cardiovascular and respiratory diseases are increasing. Environmental noise and the socioeconomic and sociodemographic situation are important factors for the diseases. Using borough health claims data from 2011 in the city of Hamburg, ecological analyses with principal component analyses were conducted to describe the relationship of road traffic noise L den (day, evening, and night) > 65 dB(A), physician density, and social deprivation with regional prevalence rates of heart failure and hypertension (n = 67 boroughs). Additionally, associations between the considered factors with borough prevalence rates of acute bronchitis and asthma in children up to 14 years old were analyzed. The multivariate regression analyses (ANCOVA) indicated that the socioeconomic and sociodemographic borough background might be associated with cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, showing the strongest association among hypertensive female patients with 9.90 percent (p < 0.0001) in the highest social deprivation category, when compared to the group of low social deprivation. However, associations between noise, physician density, and the respective health outcomes were negligible. Results will serve as a basis for further investigations. By using data from two surveys, future studies will focus on individual level data to assess the validity of our model, and to develop strategies to reduce the prevalence of cardiovascular and respiratory diseases.

Modeling the urban system for urban health and well-being with the aim of finding ways to optimize the well-being of urban dwellers is a complex task. Different modeling approaches that consider specific parts of the urban system, e.g., environmental stressors, urban society, and urban morphology, need to be integrated. The conceptual model of health-related urban well-being (UrbWellth) has been constructed to provide a structure for an integrated modeling framework. However, interfaces between the different modeling approaches were not sufficiently identified until now. The challenge to specify and operationalize these interfaces is met by using the Design Structure Matrix (DSM) concept, which is widely used in design engineering. It is used here to identify necessary interfaces within the urban system by determining the relevant interface variables and processes. The conceptual model for UrbWellth is used to construct a DSM. The results of a clustering of this UrbWellth-based DSM reveal that the structure of the conceptual model is indeed suitable to serve as a basis for an integrated model. Further, a Multi-Domain DSM (MDDSM), which is an extension of the DSM based on expert knowledge from individual modelers, identified the interface variables for the integrated model components as well as the processes for which different modeling approaches need to be coordinated. Moreover, the approach based on MDDSM identified processes that are not yet covered by the available modeling approaches.