Roe, J.J., Ward Thompson, C., Aspinall, P.A., Brewer, M.J., Duff, E.I., Miller, D., Mitchell, R. and Clow, A. (2013) ‘Green space and stress: evidence from cortisol measures in deprived urban communities’, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 10, pp. 4086–4103.

This study shifts the politics of restorative environments by placing physiological stress within deprived urban communities. Green space is no longer treated simply as a desirable amenity: it becomes a potentially unequal component of public-health infrastructure. The use of salivary cortisol alongside perceived stress is methodologically decisive because it links neighbourhood conditions to both reported and biological dimensions of stress. The research also introduces gendered complexity, showing why physiological patterns cannot be read through a universal subject. Its conceptual operation is to move environmental restoration from controlled scenes and individual preference toward the socio-spatial distribution of exposure. What matters is not simply whether vegetation has restorative potential but who encounters it, in what neighbourhood conditions and with what existing burdens. This creates a direct bridge to environmental justice and urban planning. Green-space provision becomes part of the material organisation of health inequality, making environmental psychology relevant to decisions about land, investment, maintenance and the territorial distribution of everyday resources.