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Space for Healthy Communities: An Exploration of the Social Pathways between Public Space and Health

This thesis investigates the relationship between access to public gathering spaces and self-reported health with indicators of community life as the intervening variables. This study was undertaken to investigate the relationship between the access to public space and self-rated health status in multicultural communities.

A survey of 785 randomly-selected households was conducted across four low-income Toronto neighbourhoods. The investigation is framed by the 'production of healthy public space' model, which conceptualizes the pathways between the lived experience of space and health as impacting an individual’s likelihood of establishing place attachment.

The results support the hypothesis that there is a relationship between the lived dimension of space and health. Mental health appears to be the outcome most affected by indicators of place attachment. Several of the aforementioned relationships were found more commonly in the densest of the four neighbourhoods and variations were found between foreign- and Canadian-born subpopulations.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/17183
Date24 February 2009
CreatorsKane Speer, Alexis
ContributorsDunn, James
Source SetsUniversity of Toronto
Languageen_ca
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis
Format1116018 bytes, application/pdf

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