Environmental Quality, Perceptions and Health in an Urban Context

Research objectives

Urban areas are growing fast worldwide and there is an increasing concern about the relations between urbanization, environmental threats, the quality of the living environment and human health. A healthy living environment is a prerequisite for good health. An important pathway to understand the interrelations between the quality of the living environment and health relates to the differential way in which the living environment is perceived, experienced and used by different actors. Healthy living environments consist of both an indoor environment and an outdoor environment. In this PhD we investigate perceptions of the quality of the outdoor living environment in relation to health in the urban context of the Brussels-Capital Region. Thereby we focus more particularly on air pollution as an environmental negative and on public green spaces as a potential environmental positive. To study the perceptions that Brussels urbanites have about air pollution and the quality of urban public green spaces, qualitative research methodologies are used.