Small-scale urban design interventions: A framework for deploying cities as resource for mental health and mental health literacy

Abstract

With roughly half of the global population living in cities, urban environments become central to public health often perceived as health risk factors. Indeed, mental disorders show higher incidences in urban contexts compared to rural areas. However, shared urban environments also provide a rich potential to act as a resource for mental health and as a platform to increase mental health literacy. Based on the concepts of salutogenesis and restorative environments, we propose a framework for urban design interventions. It outlines (a) an output level, i.e., preventive and discursive potentials of such interventions to act as biopsychosocial resources, and (b) a process level, i.e., mechanisms of inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration of researchers and citizens in the design process. This approach aims at combining evidence-based, salutogenic, psychosocially-supportive design with a focus on mental health. Implementing low-threshold, resource-efficient options in the existing urban context brings this topic to the public space. Implications for the implementation of such interventions for citizens, researchers, and municipality stakeholders are discussed. This illustrates new directions of research for urban person-environment interactions, public health, and beyond.

A conceptual framework to mitigate the adverse effects of surface urban heat islands through urban acupuncture: a two-phase scenario of diagnosis and prescription at the neighborhood scale

“…Moreover, the results highlight the significant influence and dependence of open public spaces, emphasizing their importance in our study, particularly during the second phase of the scenario, namely, prescription. Our findings are consistent with existing literature highlighting the importance of small-scale interventions in urban open public spaces (Hoogduyn, 2014;Müller et al, 2023).…”

“…This approach is also called Grassroots and Open-Source (Landgrave-Serrano et al, 2021). Given that SUHI represents hotspots of vulnerability for urban dwellers, urban acupuncture (UA) could help these areas by contributing to city-wide cooling through specific interventions (Müller et al, 2023;Zhang and Yuvan, 2023). Therefore, this research aims to develop a comprehensive conceptual framework to address the existing research gap and identify more suitable small-scale interventions by employing UA theory.…”

“…In summary, extensive research has been conducted to mitigate the impact of SUHI, encompassing macro and micro-scale interventions (Su et al, 2021a;Müller et al, 2023;Zhang and Yuan, 2023). Loukaitou-Sideris (2020) argues that the success of large-scale interventions relies on the stability and adaptability of small-scale interventions, such as green and permeable infrastructure (Fadhil et al, 2023;Semenzato and Bortolini, 2023).…”

Effectiveness of Evidence-Based Design Approaches for Built Environment Professional Education: A Case Study on an Urban Design Studio

“…The CHD also created a framework for the EBD process (see Figure 1). Although there are various versions of the EBD process [19,20], the CHD version is widely adopted and representative in demonstrating the fundamental workflow of the EBD method. In practice, healthcare design projects usually have clear goals and objectives at initiation, such as improving patient care experience, staff working environments, and organizational performance [16].…”