In times of rapid urbanization, health and well-being of citizens is increasingly recognized as a challenge. A remarkable amount of research on relations between urban environments and health or well-being has been conducted. To get an insight about the existing measurements on both health combined with well-being, a systematic literature search was conducted using the databases PubMed and ScienceDirect including references until July 2017. To classify the references a conceptual model describing interrelationships between factors that may be associated with health-related urban well-being was used. The keywords “urban”, “well-being”, and “health” were applied together with factors described in the model. Twenty-four articles met the inclusion criteria. Of these, most studies focused on associations between urban green, health and well-being showing the great importance of green space usage in urban settings to promote better health and well-being. Health was mostly assessed by the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12); to measure well-being, the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-Being Scale (WEMWBS) was mostly used. There are still only a few studies investigating the great complexity of urban health and well-being. More specifically, there is a lack in interdisciplinary approaches that highlight the complexity of urban structures and dynamics and their possible influence on urban health and well-being.

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.

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.

Introduction: Associations between air pollutants, meteorological conditions and respiratory diseases have been extensively shown. The aim of this study was to investigate associations between daily meteorological data, data on air pollution and emergency department (ED) visits depending on the day of the week, season and year (study period from 2013 to 2015). Methods: Highly correlated environmental data entered a categorical principal components analysis (CATPCA). We analysed cross-correlation functions between the time series of the respective daily environmental factors and daily ED visits. Time lags with peak correlations of environmental variables obtained by the CATPCA on ED visits together with day of the week, year, running day (linear, quadratic and cubic), season and interaction terms entered the univariate analysis of variance (UNIANOVA) model. Results: The analyses demonstrated main effects on ED visits for the day of the week with highest admission rates on Mondays (B=10.69; ƞ²=0.333; p<0.001). A significant time trend could be observed showing increasing numbers of ED visits per each year (p<0.001). The variable ‘running day’ (linear, quadratic and cubic) indicated a significant non-linear effect over time. The variable season showed significant results with winter, spring and summer recording fewer ED visits compared with the reference season autumn. Environmental variables showed no direct associations with respiratory ED visits. Discussion: ED visits were significantly associated with temporal variables. Our data did not show direct associations between environmental variables and ED visits. In times of rapid urbanisation, increases in respiratory diseases, temperature and air pollution, our analyses can help focus future studies and enhance strategies to reduce increasing numbers of respiratory diseases and ED visits. Because the potential costs of medical care in hospitals can be high compared with physicians, public health recommendations for reducing the increasing ED visits should be promoted and evaluated.

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.

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.