Space for wellbeing

What is a healthy environment? With rapid urbanisation, accommodating increasing numbers of residents in a restricted amount of space presents unprecedented challenges, as we realise that where people live, work, and spend time really does make a difference. Certain places have healthier populations than others, due to complex relationships between people and the physical, social, and contextual places they inhabit. The interconnections between the environment, deprivation, and wellbeing bring health geographies to the fore as a pressing social justice issue. This also creates a progressive challenge for global sustainable development to create prosperous and healthy living environments which support evolving societies and reduce health inequalities. The difficulties of defining health and space, and the subjectivity among residents, researchers, and policy makers, further complicate the matter. Spatial characteristics are therefore fundamental to understanding the multifaceted nature of health and addressing these inequalities for future populations to flourish. Drawing on examples of greenspace and mental wellbeing, we explore how and why health geographies arise, present existing knowledge on healthy environments, discuss challenges of designing research and interpreting outcomes in an evolving multi-disciplinary field, while considering the importance of subjectivity and individual differences. We outline current understanding and practice, and offer a perspective of the future of the field, including questions which still need to be answered. Traversing a range of contemporary urban issues and scales, we consider social, cultural, political, and economic dimensions from spatial, temporal, and experiential perspectives, to unravel compositional and contextual complexities of creating space for wellbeing.