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


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
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