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Cityscapes, Climate, and Mental Health: Prioritizing Thermal and Mental Wellbeing in the Design of Cities

abstract: Urban climate conditions are the physical manifestation of formal and informal social forces of design, policy, and urban management. The urban design community (e.g. planners, architects, urban designers, landscape architects, engineers) impacts urban development through influential built projects and design discourse. Their decisions create urban landscapes that impact physiological and mental health for people that live in and around them. Therefore, to understand possible opportunities for decision-making to support healthier urban environments and communities, this dissertation examines the role of neighborhood design on the thermal environment and the effect the thermal environment has on mental health. In situ data collection and numerical modeling are used to assess current and proposed urban design configurations in the Edison Eastlake public housing community in central Phoenix for their efficacy in cooling the thermal environment. A distributed lagged non-linear model is used to investigate the relative risk of hospitalization for schizophrenia in Maricopa County based on atmospheric conditions. The dissertation incorporates both an assessment of design strategies for the cooling of the thermal environment and an analysis of the existing thermal environment’s relationship with mental health. By reframing the urban design of neighborhoods through the lens of urban climate, this research reinforces the importance of incorporating the community into the planning process and highlights some unintended outcomes of prioritizing the thermal environment in urban design. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Geography 2020

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:asu.edu/item:62987
Date January 2020
ContributorsCrank, Peter J (Author), Sailor, David J (Advisor), Middel, Ariane (Committee member), Hondula, David M (Committee member), Coseo, Paul J (Committee member), Arizona State University (Publisher)
Source SetsArizona State University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeDoctoral Dissertation
Format153 pages
Rightshttp://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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