Restorative Cities

Restorative Cities: Urban Design for Mental Health and Wellbeing is the first book of its kind to set out a new urban paradigm called restorative urbanism, underpinned by mental health and human flourishing. It brings together evidence and practice from multiple disciplines to deliver a new theoretical and practical framework to develop more socially and environmentally just cities and provide:

A robust scientific basis for this growing multidisciplinary field
An exciting new framework for restorative urbanism that defines and integrates seven components of a restorative city.
Clear but flexible design principles at a neighbourhood scale and a city scale.
Beautiful illustrations by architect Spring Braccia-Beck along with colour photographs for examples of good practice.

The book will appeal to anyone interested in urban design for mental health including students, academics, policymakers, public health practitioners, doctors, psychiatrists and anyone involved in either planning and designing city spaces or using them for therapeutic purposes.

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Awards

2022 EDRA 53 Great Places Awards Honorable Mention Place Book

Testimonials

An inspiring, educational, and succinct tour of the intersection of applied psychology, urban planning and design, and public health … an accessible and modern handbook about how to envision and create humane urban settings that tend to the many psychosocial factors that matter now – and will for generations to come.
Lindsay J McCunn, environmental psychologist, Cities & Health

Offers deep health expertise translated into the practical strategies that respond to today’s demand for cities that prioritise their residents’ health
Joanna Frank, President and CEO, Center for Active Design

Post-Covid-19, cities must be equitable and sustainable, and people should live more healthily and happily. Restorative Cities shows how we can do this, by focusing urbanism on mental health and wellbeing
Gil Penalosa, Chair of 8 80 Cities, Ambassador for World Urban Parks

The book addresses a highly important and timely subject matter particularly in light of the pandemic. The chapters are well-organized in presenting the framework. The call-out boxes are very useful for those not familiar with the key concepts. It offers practical suggestions to design and showcases relevant case studies to illustrate the possibilities. Packed with practical concepts and useful information.
Juror, EDRA 53 (2022) Place Book Award

Reviews

Morning Star

“Overall, a valuable and hopefully enduring contribution and while it might not always answer how cities might best be liberated from corporate rule, cars and congestion it is certainly one central to the mechanics of how best go about restoring cities to people, culture and nature.” – Steven Andrew, Morning Star, 26th July 2022

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Cities and Health

“An inspiring, educational, and succinct tour of the intersection of applied psychology, urban planning and design, and public health… expresses a scholarly balance of evidence for and against the benefits of many urban features on mental health… Overall, the book is both prudent and empowering as it consolidates a breadth of theoretical and practical findings from a number of related disciplines into a single resource for considering an urban paradigm motivated by mental health and human flourishing. Readers of the book are left with what feels like an accessible and modern handbook about how to envision and create humane urban settings that tend to the many psychosocial factors that matter now – and will for generations to come.” – Lindsay J McCunn

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