Wellbeing and Social Health in the Built Environment

The physical environment is critical to human experience and sustainable habitation, with multiplex impacts on people’s experience. Physical settings influence health, safety, economic and social life, sense of communityCommunity, and aesthetic nourishment. For citiesCity to involve sustainable resource use, they should be efficiently used, and to promote efficient use, they should be convenient and appealing. Drawing on a rich repertoire of research in people’s use of buildings and urban spaces, this chapter looks beyond well-recognised factors like thermal quality, addressing life style and balanceBalance, and social influences on ‘wellbeingWellbeing in use’, including: locationLocation, spatial scaleSpatial scale, biophiliaBiophilia, ‘active by designActive by design’, community and social memorySocial memory.