White, M.P. et al. (2019) ‘Spending at least 120 minutes a week in nature is associated with good health and wellbeing’, Scientific Reports, 9, article 7730. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-44097-3.

Environmental contact has duration, and duration is not captured by the mere presence of a park near a home. White and colleagues analyse survey evidence from 19,806 respondents in England, examining reported nature contact during the preceding week in relation to self-reported health and wellbeing while accounting for several individual and neighbourhood characteristics. The widely discussed two-hour association is a descriptive threshold in an observational analysis, not a universal prescription or a demonstrated causal minimum. This distinction is central. The paper turns exposure into an accumulated temporal quantity and raises questions about the relation between visit frequency, duration and the social conditions that permit contact. It also illustrates the limits of large-scale comparability: total minutes cannot identify whether contact was freely chosen, interrupted, accessible, stressful, socially meaningful or restorative. For urban field research, the value of the study lies less in adopting 120 minutes as a target than in refusing to conflate environmental availability with experienced time. A route has duration, but a duration does not yet describe a route.

Winkler, M.S., Furu, P., Viliani, F., Cave, B., Divall, M., Ramesh, G., Harris-Roxas, B. and Knoblauch, A.M. (2020) ‘Current global health impact assessment practice’, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(9), 2988. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17092988

 

The capacity to assess an environmental intervention's health implications is itself unequally institutionalised. Winkler and colleagues survey 122 health-impact-assessment practitioners across 29 countries to characterise working practices, drivers, barriers, training and reliance on guidance. The survey does not estimate the health consequences of an urban project. Instead, it examines the practical infrastructure through which prospective consequences become recognisable and actionable in planning and policy. Its central operation is to turn assessment procedures and their institutional distribution into empirical objects. Differences in policy frameworks, expertise and resources affect what can be asked, compared and acted upon; methodological standardisation without capacity building cannot remove those disparities. Its evidence is descriptive and reliant on a self-selecting professional sample, so global representativeness cannot be assumed. The paper connects public health, environmental governance, institutional sociology and methodological standard-setting. For comparative urban research it distinguishes a claim about experienced wellbeing from an authorised health-impact assessment and makes visible the conditions under which the latter could responsibly inform decisions.

RESTORAN SPLENDID

 

RESTORAN SPLENDID - NIKOLA ISLAND - VERNISSAGE

ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE  >

                        

METKA KRASOVEC 

BRIGITTE BRAND 

RUDI BENETIK 

STANISLAV HABJAN 

ANTO LLOVERAS

SEBASTIJAN VOJVODA 

ZUZANA KALINAKOVA 

COLONIA DI RIVIERA 

NIKOLA ISLAND  - POREC CROATIA          

VERNISSAGE - SEPTEMBER 14TH 2012 8PM

CURATED BY DANINO BOZIC

Korpela, K.M., Ylén, M., Tyrväinen, L. and Silvennoinen, H. (2008) ‘Determinants of restorative experiences in everyday favorite places’, Health & Place, 14(4), pp. 636–652. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2007.10.008.

The restorative environment is not a universal type of place but a relation between a setting, a person's history and the pressures of everyday life. Drawing on a questionnaire sample of 1,089 respondents in Helsinki and Tampere, Korpela and colleagues distinguish immediate patterns of visiting from biographical nature orientation, current stressors and social circumstances. This is a decisive methodological move: the unit of explanation expands beyond the landscape to include the conditions under which a landscape is sought, inhabited and remembered. Their differentiation among extensively managed natural areas, built green spaces, watersides, activity settings and urban locations prevents a simple natural-versus-built opposition from doing all the analytical work. The proposal of ‘favorite place prescriptions’ is provocative precisely because it turns an individual geography of preference into a possible health resource. Yet prescription risks standardising what the evidence identifies as personally variable. For comparative urban research, the paper requires attention to repeated use, self-selection and the temporal biography of attachment, not only to environmental inventories or single-visit wellbeing scores.

Bornioli, A., Parkhurst, G. and Morgan, P. (2018) ‘The psychological wellbeing benefits of place engagement during walking in urban environments: a qualitative photo-elicitation study’, Health & Place, 53, pp. 228–236. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2018.08.018.

Walking is not merely an exercise performed against an environmental background; it is a situated relation through which the environment becomes perceptible, meaningful and potentially beneficial. Bornioli, Parkhurst and Morgan make this distinction experimentally consequential at the level of research design by using qualitative photo-elicitation to bring the participant's own encounters with urban places into the production of evidence. The photograph does not simply illustrate an interview already conducted: it helps establish which moments of the walk deserve description, and whose categories of experience count. Their approach complicates the assumption that beneficial walking can be predicted adequately from a route's objectively measured properties. The psychological significance of a street may emerge through memory, attention, social recognition or the pleasures of engagement rather than through greenery alone. The paper bridges health geography, environmental psychology and mobile qualitative research. Its particular value is to make place engagement an observable research problem without reducing it to either a map coordinate or a generic statement of satisfaction. Its qualitative design does not, however, establish population-level causal effects.

Aldred, R., Goodman, A. and Woodcock, J. (2024) ‘Impacts of active travel interventions on travel behaviour and health: Results from a five-year longitudinal travel survey in Outer London’, Journal of Transport & Health, 35, 101771.

 

Aldred, Goodman and Woodcock use longitudinal evidence from Outer London to evaluate active-travel infrastructure and changes in walking and cycling behaviour. The study’s controlled comparisons distinguish residents exposed to different levels of intervention, including low-traffic neighbourhoods, and connect observed mobility changes to prospective health benefits. Its epistemic operation is temporal: rather than inferring transformation from a single snapshot or a desirable design image, it examines how behaviour evolves across successive waves of measurement. Transport epidemiology, public health, infrastructure evaluation and urban policy are brought into a common evidentiary frame. This matters because lived accounts can illuminate mechanisms without, on their own, establishing the duration or distribution of population-level effects. Conversely, longitudinal averages can register change while obscuring the frictions and exclusions through which it occurs. A credible comparative account requires both scales, while refusing to treat either as the final authority over the other.

Khreis, H., Williams, H., Abdollahpour, S.S., van den Bosch, M., Mudu, P., Tainio, M., Poom, A., Sohrabi, S. and Hankey, S. (2024) ‘The nexus of transportation, the built environment, air pollution and health’, Cities & Health. https://doi.org/10.1080/23748834.2024.2376389

Khreis and colleagues refuse to treat transport, environmental exposure and health as separate policy silos. Their multidisciplinary review traces how built and natural environments condition travel, how travel changes pollution exposure and physical activity, and how these pathways combine in health outcomes. The paper's distinctive operation is the construction of an upstream-to-downstream causal field in which mobility is simultaneously a behavioural choice, an exposure mechanism and an outcome of infrastructure. It bridges epidemiology, transport research, urban planning and environmental health without claiming that a single indicator captures their interactions. This makes it an essential counterweight to purely experiential accounts of walking. A route can feel restorative while carrying measurable exposure burdens, and a seemingly efficient intervention can redistribute risks unevenly. For neighbourhood comparison, the paper calls for explicit boundaries between immediate self-reported wellbeing, exposure measures and longer-term health claims. Those boundaries protect the validity of a modest field protocol while allowing it to connect to more demanding epidemiological research.

Turcu, C. (2025) ‘Urban greenspace, climate adaptation and health co-benefits: Municipal policy and practice in London’, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 22(3), 409. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph22030409.

The administrative city does not see a single green space. It encounters distinct indicators, departmental responsibilities and evaluation conventions, each able to make some benefits visible while leaving others unregistered. Drawing on interviews and focus groups with London boroughs, Turcu examines what municipalities measure, why those measures enter local frameworks, and how green-space interventions connect climate adaptation with health. The study finds fragmented practices and weak integration between climate, greenspace and health objectives. This is more than an implementation gap after science has produced its results: the apparatus of governance determines which relationships can be demonstrated and compared in the first place. Shade, flood management, air quality and lived wellbeing may coexist geographically without sharing accountable units, timescales or reporting obligations. Turcu joins planning policy, climate research and public health through an institutional diagnosis of evidence production. Her paper gives an essential counterweight to participant-centred methods: residents’ observations become politically consequential only when public organisations can receive, interpret and test them without converting their complexity into an unexamined composite score.

Aghabozorgi, K., van der Jagt, A., Bell, S. and Smith, H. (2024) ‘How university blue and green space affect students’ mental health: A scoping review’, Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, 97, 128394. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ufug.2024.128394.

The apparently simple unit of a campus landscape becomes unstable once it must account for mental health. This scoping review brings 54 eligible studies into a shared frame but makes their incompatibilities unusually visible: the studies describe different landscape features, exposures, populations, instruments and outcomes. More than 96 per cent report a positive association of some kind, yet that convergence is not a common measure of landscape efficacy. Its analytical achievement is therefore partly negative. By treating variation in study design as evidence about the field itself, Aghabozorgi and colleagues separate the existence of a promising association from the capacity to explain precisely what the landscape does. The relatively thin evidence concerning blue-space characteristics and design qualities matters because these are exactly the features that planning drawings and site inventories make most easily legible. The review bridges landscape architecture, environmental psychology and public health while revealing the distance between visually identifiable provision and demonstrable experiential mechanisms. A green campus is an institutional asset, an ecological configuration and a lived itinerary; none of these descriptions can simply stand in for the others.

Michel, S., Banwell, N. and Senn, N. (2024) ‘Mobility infrastructures and health: Scoping review of studies in Europe’, Public Health Reviews, 45, 1606862. https://doi.org/10.3389/phrs.2024.1606862.

A pavement is simultaneously a material arrangement, a behavioural possibility and a public-health intervention, but the three descriptions require different evidence. Michel and colleagues review 146 European articles and reports concerning mobility infrastructure, active travel, health and co-benefits. Connections between pavement networks, destinations and walking are recurrent, as are associations between active transport and certain health outcomes. Yet a literature organised around transport can privilege movements that have a destination and can overlook the circumstances that make a route desirable, negotiable or refused. The review’s useful operation is cross-scalar: it carries knowledge from street configuration through reported mobility to health and collective costs without reducing each level to the preceding one. Its policy relevance also requires restraint. A favourable modelled effect is not the same as the experience of a newly built path, and associations drawn from heterogeneous interventions are not guarantees for a particular neighbourhood. Transport planning, primary care and health assessment intersect here around infrastructure as a proposal whose consequences must still be observed.

Larrington-Spencer, H., Verlinghieri, E., Lawlor, E. and Aldred, R. (2025) ‘Troubling go-alongs through the lens of care’, Qualitative Research, 25(3), pp. 690–710. https://doi.org/10.1177/14687941241277747

The celebrated intimacy of mobile interviewing becomes more complicated when the researcher is recognised as a vulnerable body rather than an invisible recording device. Drawing on four vignettes from 118 go-along interviews in and around London's Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, the authors consider encounters shaped by reciprocity, solidarity, exhaustion and abuse. Care is neither simply a duty bestowed by investigators on participants nor a guarantee secured by consent forms; it is negotiated relationally, under unequal conditions. Researcher precarity and stigma are part of the production of spatial evidence, not external biography. In two cases, virtual go-alongs were also used, underscoring how access requires flexible yet non-equivalent modes of participation. The article contests an easy claim that walking methods automatically democratise the interview. Its operation is reflexive: it turns the conditions of observation back into objects of analysis. Mobility studies, feminist ethics and methodological criticism thereby reveal the limits of any urban evidence protocol that counts routes while leaving exposure, fatigue and asymmetric risk unrecorded.