Urban Built Environment and Mental Health: Empirical Evidence from Beijing

Speaker:

Prof. Xize WANG, Assistant Professor, Department of Real Estate, National University of Singapore

Xize WANG is an assistant professor at the Department of Real Estate at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He is also a faculty affiliate of the NUS Institute of Real Estate and Urban Studies and the NUS Centre for Family and Population Research. An urban planner by training, he works interdisciplinarily in the fields of urban planning, public policy, transportation, and public health. Prior to NUS, Prof. Wang was a postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley. He has received a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California, an M.A. from the University of Minnesota, and B.Eng. and B.A. degrees from Peking University. More details of Prof. Wang’s research interest and publications can be found in his personal website: https://xizewang.github.io/.

Abstract:

As a vital aspect of an individual’s quality of life, mental health has been included as an important component of the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals. This seminar focuses on a specific aspect of mental health: depression, and introduces two studies that examine its relationship with broadly-defined built environment factors. The first study focuses on journey-to-work patterns and finds that every additional 10 minutes of commute time is associated with a 1.1% higher probability of depression. The second study focuses on residential crowding and finds that living in a crowded place—measured by both square meters per person and persons per beProfoom—is significantly associated with a higher risk of depression. Additionally, the studies tested for the mechanisms of these associations and identified subgroups that have relatively stronger effect sizes. The findings show that inequality in the built environment in our cities can lead to disparities in health outcomes.

Date: 28/06/2024 (Friday)

Time: 10:00-11:30

Venue: E21B-G002

Language: English