When environments add up: Co-located urban exposures and health across the lifecourse

This episode in the series will be focusing on 'When environments add up: Co-located urban exposures and health across the lifecourse', hosted by guest speaker Dr Matthew Hobbs from Sheffield Hallam University and the University of Canterbury.  

The importance of place in shaping health and wellbeing is increasingly recognised in both research and policy. However, health is rarely shaped by a single environmental exposure in isolation. Instead, it may reflect the co-location of multiple urban environmental features and the way exposure to these environments accumulates over time and across the lifecourse.

This talk introduces a spatial lifecourse perspective, showing how harmful and protective environments can cluster in place and persist over time, embedding unequal health risks. Drawing on longitudinal geospatial research, this talk explores why understanding how environments add up over time is essential for designing healthier and more equitable urban places. It will also reflect on some key methodological and conceptual challenges of studying cumulative exposure at scale.

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Please find details of future seminars below.

The Healthy Urban Project aims to understand how local urban places impact health and how this understanding can be used to help cities become healthier and happier places to live.

As part of this project, we will be hosting a series of online seminars that will aim to explore a variety of research topics relating to the impact of urban environments on health by inviting guest speakers to share their research.
The 2025 and 2026 seminars will take place online at 11am on the last Wednesday of the chosen month.

The details of all our upcoming seminars, with topics and guest speakers, are detailed below. If you are interested in the other episodes, please use the links below to sign up to the seminars:

Please note you must sign up for each seminar separately.