Restorative cities: urban design for mental health and wellbeing

Given that more than half of the world’s population lives in cities, and the urbanisation process continues, it is natural for urban health to be an important concern for many actors from research to decision-making. Urban health as a research and intervention field is usually focused on human health (‘limited by human-centrism’, p. i); the book reviewed here makes a valuable contribution because it ‘turns its attention to urban biodiversity and the many non-human species that live in, make and share cities with humans’ (p. i). This book is authored, and this fact contributes to its homogeneity; it does not contain original research, but it is a synthesis of the main contributions from a range of disciplines to support the author’s idea about a ‘morethan-human’ urban environment. Being part of Routledge Studies in Environment and Health series, which is dedicated to the study of environmental change on human health, this book is set in the human–environment interaction space and wants to understand what makes healthy urban environments and who they are for. Dr. Cecily Maller is Associate Professor, Vice Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow and Co-leader of the Beyond Behaviour Change Research Program – Centre for Urban Research, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University, Australia. Her research activity combines topics from the areas of urbanism, health and nature, focusing on humanenvironment interactions. Because healthy nature means healthy people (this is also the title of one of the author’s previous articles), the aims of the book are to foster a greater appreciation of the things that make the world more-than-human, to open new ways of thinking, knowing and understanding cities and urban environments as more-than-human habitat, and to encourage experimentation with new concepts and ideas from a more-than-human perspective. Therefore, the author’s approach is organized in two parts that include eight chapters. The first part (Understanding more-than-human theories, Chapters 2–4) draws on philosophical and theoretical resources from three bodies of theory (The Affective Turn, The New Materialisms Turn and The Practice Turn). The chapters in this part describe the main literature associated with each turn and discuss the key contributions from each. The second part (Making more-than-human healthy urban environments, Chapters 5–8) uses the ideas and theories to reconceptualise health and wellbeing in cities as more-than-human, and also how to make cities more-than-human habitat. The author considers that ‘living non-humans should also be considered as both recipients and creators of healthy urban environments’ (p. 91): healthy urban environments are not only about people, they must also be eco-centric urban places. The book includes only two figures, but the narrative is engaging and accessible to readers, with short chapters including notes and an extensive references section. Given its focus on the relationship between urban health, planning, and the environment, the book is of interest to scholars, students, policymakers and professionals in human geography, planning, sociology, health and environment-related fields.