Working with collaborators around the theme of urban public health
About SUPHI
Cities have always brought both benefits and threats for human health. In an increasingly urbanised world, the challenge is now how to manage our cities so that they foster sustainable wellbeing for their inhabitants and the planet.
SUPHI (Social Science and Urban Public Health Institute) is a collaboration from across and beyond King’s College London. We aim to bring insights from social theory to bear on urgent questions in public health and to develop inter-disciplinary methods for responding to these.
A shared aim is to develop pragmatic, empirically mindful approaches to problems that are emerging in the everyday conduct of public health. Innovative theory and methods are needed to address ‘real world’ public health challenges. Rather than grand solutions or technical fixes, we will foster new ways of approaching these by bringing together ‘theory’ and ‘practice’.
Our over-arching research questions include:
- How do different urban forms shape health? How does the city ‘get under the skin’ of those who live in it?
- How does city governance foster (or not) citizenship and participation?
- What are the roles of digital and other technologies in configuring urban health?
- How are local neighbourhoods experienced in a globalised world?
Directors
Judith Green is Professor of Sociology of Health in the School of Population Health & Environmental Sciences. She has researched and published widely on qualitative methods, transport and health, risk and professions. Her current research interests are in critical public health, mobility & health, and methodologies for evaluation.
Stephani Hatch combines her background in sociology and psychiatric epidemiology as a Reader at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience. Her research focuses on urban mental health and inequalities in health and health service use. She also leads the Health Inequalities Research Network (HERON) for public and service user engagement in the local community.
Nikolas Rose is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Kings College London which he founded in 2012. He is a social and political theorist, with a particular focus on questions of political power, mental health, psychiatry and neuroscience. His most recent books include The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (2007); Governing The Present (with Peter Miller, 2008) and Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind (with Joelle Abi-Rached, 2013). His current work seeks to develop new relations between the social sciences and the life sciences, partly through research on mental health, migration and megacities: his forthcoming book The Urban Brain: Living in the Neurosocial City (with Des Fitzgerald) will be published by Princeton University Press in 2018. His long overdue book on Our Psychiatric Future? was published by Polity Press in 2018.
For more information on our directors, members and advisory board, please see the people tab below.
People
Research student
Visiting Professor
Senior lecturer in Social Science and Health
Research associate
Vice Dean for Culture, Diversity & Inclusion
Head, School of Global Affairs
Themes
Urban mobility and health
Mobility and health are profoundly interlinked. Apart from the well-studied effects of international and rural-urban migration on health, more mundane experiences of local mobility are increasingly recognised as both affecting wellbeing, and shaping what we understand wellbeing to be. Social scientists have long been interested in ‘living well’ in the city, and members of SUPHI are bringing insights from sociology, anthropology, geography and data science to bear on the implications of mobility for healthy public policy, including work on healthy cities of the south, collaborations with partners overseas, and research on the global city on our doorstep: London. Accessing the determinants of health – employment, goods and services – requires access to transport: a major challenge for those in informal settlements at the edges of many global cities. Even in high income cities, the right to mobility is not guaranteed. Older bodies, disabled bodies, and younger bodies are more difficult to align with many urban transport systems, which often require alert, agile and assertive users. Urban transport policy directly affects wellbeing. It can impact on how cities shape opportunities for active travel, and who does it: why cycling in London is still disproportionately an activity for affluent, white men; or what influences children’s walking in London for instance.
Urban mental health
Social scientists have long been interested in urban mental health, particularly the impact of the urban living environment and social adversity on mental health in contexts where people are more likely to encounter demographic diversity. Members of SUPHI utilise interdisciplinary methodologies across urban sociology, anthropology, social epidemiology and geography to establish new knowledge and methodologies to better understand the social and environmental determinants and consequences of poor mental health and wellbeing over the life course. Public mental health, particularly in global cities where there are growing numbers of people moving into urban environments, continues to require attention. Social and health policy change, changes in the distribution of economic resources and concomitant effects on the availability of social services highlights the importance of ‘thinking locally’ when it comes to urban mental health. Further, demographic changes resulting from shifting migration patterns to cities, alongside new pressures and demands on the built environment all contribute to how we experience and understand mental health. Indeed, social scientists working in biomedical collaborations like the Urban Brain Lab are beginning to foster a space for interdisciplinary approaches to how we understand the effects and process of city living at the level of the brain itself. The impact of persistent, disabling and common mental disorders is most profound and costly in highly populated, urban communities. In response, social science researchers have focused on identifying and better understanding how social issues, such as homelessness and illicit drug use, contribute to poor mental health, as well as generate and perpetuate inequities in mental health and service use. Indeed, how particular social groups become and experience ‘minority status’ (and thereby a loss of status) through processes such as migration and social exclusion highlights the acute and chronic social stressors that elicit psychological and physiological responses that in turn influence mental health.
Activities
SUPHI stories
Explore the series of features written within the SUPHI research group including Judith Green, Shayda Kashef, Andrew Guise, Benjamin Hanckel
Podcast
Podcast by The Policy Forum Pod with SUPHI member Professor Nikolas Rose discussing stress in the city.
Blogs
Read external blog posts written by SUPHI members Benjamin Hanckel, Judith Green and Andy Guise.
- 9 September 2019: Trans health and the risks of inappropriate curiosity
- 17 July 2019: Promoting health without promoting stigma?
- 10 April 2019: Urban Nature
- 14 November 2018: Does it matter who funds public health?
- 25 April 2018: Rough Sleeping and the Unhealthy City
- 22 November 2017: Risk and danger – time to change systems, not humans?
Working with publics
News articles around SUPHI's work with the public.
News
Public Priorities for Public Health Research
To inform our priorities for research, and identify how best to partner with local organisations, the Social Science & Urban Public Health Institute (SUPHI)...
Research
Research papers
- September 2019 Kelly, MP, Green, J 2019 ‘What can sociology offer urban public health?’ Critical Public Health DOI: 10.1080/09581596.2019.1654193
- August 2019 Hanckel, B, Ruta, D, Scott, G, Peacock, JL, Green, J 2019 ‘The Daily Mile as a public health intervention: A rapid ethnographic assessment of uptake and implementation in South London, UK’ BMC Public Health DOI: 10.1186/s12898-019-7511-9
- July 2019: Milton, S, Mold, A, Tinker, A, Herrick, C 2019 ‘Growing old in New Towns: A call for research on health and ageing in planned urban environments’ Health & Place DOI: 10.1016
- May 2019: Byron, P, Robards, B, Hanckel, B, Vivienne, S, Churchill, B 2019 ‘”Hey, I’m having these experiences”: Tumblr use and young people’s queer (dis)connections’ International Journal of Communication DOI: 1932-8036/20190005
- May 2019: Hanckel, B, Vivienne, S, Byron, P, Robards, B, Churchill, B 2019 ‘‘That’s not necessarily for them’: LGBTIQ+ young people, social media platform affordances and identity curation’ Media, culture & society DOI: 10.1177/0163443719846612
- April 2019: Schofield, P, Kordowicz, M, Pennycooke, E, Armstrong, D 2019 ‘Ethnic differences in psychosis – Lay epidemiology explanations’ Health expectations: An international journal of public participation in health care and health policy DOI: 10.1111/hex.12901
- March 2019: Green, J 2019 ‘Time to interrogate corporate interests in public health?’ Critical Public Health DOI: 10.1080/09581596.2019.1587886
- February 2019: Calvillo, N, Garnett, E 2019 ‘Data intimacies: Building infrastructures for intensified embodied encounters with air pollution’ The Sociological Review Monographs DOI: 10.1177/0038026119830575
- November 2018: Gunasinghe, C, Gazard, B, Aschan, L, MacCrimmon, S, Hotopf, M, Hatch, S 2018 ‘Debt, common mental disorders and mental health service use’. DOI: 10.1080/09638237.2018.1487541
- October 2018: Garnett, E, Green, J, Chalabi, Z, Wilksinson, P 2018 ‘Materialising links between air pollution and health: How societal impact was achieved in an interdisciplinary project’ Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine. DOI: 10.1177/1363459318804590
- March 2018: Corran, P, Steinbach, R, Saunders, L & Green, J 2018, ‘Age, disability and everyday mobility in London: an analysis of the correlates of ‘non-travel’ in travel diary data‘ Journal of transport & health. DOI: 10.1016/j.jth.2017.12.008
Further reading:
Urban mobility and health:
- Urban social exclusion and mental health of China's rural-urban migrants – A review and call for research
- Living well in the Neuropolis
- Healthy Cities of/ from the South - Dr Clare Herrick
- Cycling and the city: a case study of how gendered, ethnic and class identities can shape healthy transport choices
- Look who's walking: Social and environmental correlates of children's walking in London
- Detecting the dynamics of urban structure through spatial network analysis
- Enacting toxicity: epidemiology and the study of air pollution for public health
- Designing the fit city: public health, active lives, and the (re) instrumentalization of urban space
- Automobility reconfigured? Ironic seductions and mundane freedoms in 16–21 year olds’ accounts of car driving and ownership
- The Travelling Citizen: Emer-gent Discourses of Moral Mobility in a Study of Cycling in London
- Thinking about changing mobility practices: how a social practice approach can help
- We can all just get on a bus and go”: rethinking independent mobility in the context of the universal provision of free bus travel to young Londoners
Urban mental health:
- The urban lab brain
- The experience of initiating injection drug use and its social context
- Minority status and mental distress: a comparison of group density effects
- Challenges in researching migration status, health and health service use
- Discrimination and common mental disorder among migrant and ethnic groups
- South East London Community Health Study (SELCoH)
- Importance of Thinking Locally for Mental Health
- Investigating Exposure to Violence and Mental Health in a Diverse Urban Community Sample
- Comparisons of polydrug use at national and inner city levels in England
- Debt, common mental disorders and mental health service use
- Ethnic isolation and psychosis: re-examining the ethnic density effect
- Influence of perceived and actual neighbourhood disorder on common mental illness
- HERON
Conferences
- 6 June 2019: Andrew Barry, Vera Ehrenstein (UCL), Angeliki Balayannis (Exeter) and Emma Garnett (KCL), organised a workshop on The Chemical hosted by UCL
- 8 April 2019: Judy Green, Andy Guise, Fiona Stevenson (UCL) and Catherine Will (Sussex) organised the Sociological Contributions to Public Health Symposium, a one-day symposium to take forward work on strengthening the links between sociology and public health in the UK. This was supported by the SHI Foundation.
- 31 October 2018: Andrew Guise discusses a social science perspective on addressing homelessness and urban exclusion in London at the HERON Conference 2018.
- 22 June 2018: Professor Judith Green and Professor Steven Hoffman, scientific director of CIHR’s Institute of Population & Public Health, explore the implications of digital divides and digital connections for urban life and social policy at a half-day symposium hosted by the O’Brien Institute for Public Health. Key note given by Professor Green.
- 15 June 2018: Philip Corran and Emma Garnett speak on urban mobility and health at the European Sociological Association, Urban Sociology Conference in Madrid.
- 12-13 June 2018: Cities & Mental Health Conference This conference brought together different groups and other scholars working on related issues to discuss recent results, new methodologies and forms of interdisciplinary collaboration on the city/psychosis nexus.
- 26 April 2018: SUPHI Launch and public health workshop.
People
Research student
Visiting Professor
Senior lecturer in Social Science and Health
Research associate
Vice Dean for Culture, Diversity & Inclusion
Head, School of Global Affairs
Themes
Urban mobility and health
Mobility and health are profoundly interlinked. Apart from the well-studied effects of international and rural-urban migration on health, more mundane experiences of local mobility are increasingly recognised as both affecting wellbeing, and shaping what we understand wellbeing to be. Social scientists have long been interested in ‘living well’ in the city, and members of SUPHI are bringing insights from sociology, anthropology, geography and data science to bear on the implications of mobility for healthy public policy, including work on healthy cities of the south, collaborations with partners overseas, and research on the global city on our doorstep: London. Accessing the determinants of health – employment, goods and services – requires access to transport: a major challenge for those in informal settlements at the edges of many global cities. Even in high income cities, the right to mobility is not guaranteed. Older bodies, disabled bodies, and younger bodies are more difficult to align with many urban transport systems, which often require alert, agile and assertive users. Urban transport policy directly affects wellbeing. It can impact on how cities shape opportunities for active travel, and who does it: why cycling in London is still disproportionately an activity for affluent, white men; or what influences children’s walking in London for instance.
Urban mental health
Social scientists have long been interested in urban mental health, particularly the impact of the urban living environment and social adversity on mental health in contexts where people are more likely to encounter demographic diversity. Members of SUPHI utilise interdisciplinary methodologies across urban sociology, anthropology, social epidemiology and geography to establish new knowledge and methodologies to better understand the social and environmental determinants and consequences of poor mental health and wellbeing over the life course. Public mental health, particularly in global cities where there are growing numbers of people moving into urban environments, continues to require attention. Social and health policy change, changes in the distribution of economic resources and concomitant effects on the availability of social services highlights the importance of ‘thinking locally’ when it comes to urban mental health. Further, demographic changes resulting from shifting migration patterns to cities, alongside new pressures and demands on the built environment all contribute to how we experience and understand mental health. Indeed, social scientists working in biomedical collaborations like the Urban Brain Lab are beginning to foster a space for interdisciplinary approaches to how we understand the effects and process of city living at the level of the brain itself. The impact of persistent, disabling and common mental disorders is most profound and costly in highly populated, urban communities. In response, social science researchers have focused on identifying and better understanding how social issues, such as homelessness and illicit drug use, contribute to poor mental health, as well as generate and perpetuate inequities in mental health and service use. Indeed, how particular social groups become and experience ‘minority status’ (and thereby a loss of status) through processes such as migration and social exclusion highlights the acute and chronic social stressors that elicit psychological and physiological responses that in turn influence mental health.
Activities
SUPHI stories
Explore the series of features written within the SUPHI research group including Judith Green, Shayda Kashef, Andrew Guise, Benjamin Hanckel
Podcast
Podcast by The Policy Forum Pod with SUPHI member Professor Nikolas Rose discussing stress in the city.
Blogs
Read external blog posts written by SUPHI members Benjamin Hanckel, Judith Green and Andy Guise.
- 9 September 2019: Trans health and the risks of inappropriate curiosity
- 17 July 2019: Promoting health without promoting stigma?
- 10 April 2019: Urban Nature
- 14 November 2018: Does it matter who funds public health?
- 25 April 2018: Rough Sleeping and the Unhealthy City
- 22 November 2017: Risk and danger – time to change systems, not humans?
Working with publics
News articles around SUPHI's work with the public.
News
Public Priorities for Public Health Research
To inform our priorities for research, and identify how best to partner with local organisations, the Social Science & Urban Public Health Institute (SUPHI)...
Research
Research papers
- September 2019 Kelly, MP, Green, J 2019 ‘What can sociology offer urban public health?’ Critical Public Health DOI: 10.1080/09581596.2019.1654193
- August 2019 Hanckel, B, Ruta, D, Scott, G, Peacock, JL, Green, J 2019 ‘The Daily Mile as a public health intervention: A rapid ethnographic assessment of uptake and implementation in South London, UK’ BMC Public Health DOI: 10.1186/s12898-019-7511-9
- July 2019: Milton, S, Mold, A, Tinker, A, Herrick, C 2019 ‘Growing old in New Towns: A call for research on health and ageing in planned urban environments’ Health & Place DOI: 10.1016
- May 2019: Byron, P, Robards, B, Hanckel, B, Vivienne, S, Churchill, B 2019 ‘”Hey, I’m having these experiences”: Tumblr use and young people’s queer (dis)connections’ International Journal of Communication DOI: 1932-8036/20190005
- May 2019: Hanckel, B, Vivienne, S, Byron, P, Robards, B, Churchill, B 2019 ‘‘That’s not necessarily for them’: LGBTIQ+ young people, social media platform affordances and identity curation’ Media, culture & society DOI: 10.1177/0163443719846612
- April 2019: Schofield, P, Kordowicz, M, Pennycooke, E, Armstrong, D 2019 ‘Ethnic differences in psychosis – Lay epidemiology explanations’ Health expectations: An international journal of public participation in health care and health policy DOI: 10.1111/hex.12901
- March 2019: Green, J 2019 ‘Time to interrogate corporate interests in public health?’ Critical Public Health DOI: 10.1080/09581596.2019.1587886
- February 2019: Calvillo, N, Garnett, E 2019 ‘Data intimacies: Building infrastructures for intensified embodied encounters with air pollution’ The Sociological Review Monographs DOI: 10.1177/0038026119830575
- November 2018: Gunasinghe, C, Gazard, B, Aschan, L, MacCrimmon, S, Hotopf, M, Hatch, S 2018 ‘Debt, common mental disorders and mental health service use’. DOI: 10.1080/09638237.2018.1487541
- October 2018: Garnett, E, Green, J, Chalabi, Z, Wilksinson, P 2018 ‘Materialising links between air pollution and health: How societal impact was achieved in an interdisciplinary project’ Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine. DOI: 10.1177/1363459318804590
- March 2018: Corran, P, Steinbach, R, Saunders, L & Green, J 2018, ‘Age, disability and everyday mobility in London: an analysis of the correlates of ‘non-travel’ in travel diary data‘ Journal of transport & health. DOI: 10.1016/j.jth.2017.12.008
Further reading:
Urban mobility and health:
- Urban social exclusion and mental health of China's rural-urban migrants – A review and call for research
- Living well in the Neuropolis
- Healthy Cities of/ from the South - Dr Clare Herrick
- Cycling and the city: a case study of how gendered, ethnic and class identities can shape healthy transport choices
- Look who's walking: Social and environmental correlates of children's walking in London
- Detecting the dynamics of urban structure through spatial network analysis
- Enacting toxicity: epidemiology and the study of air pollution for public health
- Designing the fit city: public health, active lives, and the (re) instrumentalization of urban space
- Automobility reconfigured? Ironic seductions and mundane freedoms in 16–21 year olds’ accounts of car driving and ownership
- The Travelling Citizen: Emer-gent Discourses of Moral Mobility in a Study of Cycling in London
- Thinking about changing mobility practices: how a social practice approach can help
- We can all just get on a bus and go”: rethinking independent mobility in the context of the universal provision of free bus travel to young Londoners
Urban mental health:
- The urban lab brain
- The experience of initiating injection drug use and its social context
- Minority status and mental distress: a comparison of group density effects
- Challenges in researching migration status, health and health service use
- Discrimination and common mental disorder among migrant and ethnic groups
- South East London Community Health Study (SELCoH)
- Importance of Thinking Locally for Mental Health
- Investigating Exposure to Violence and Mental Health in a Diverse Urban Community Sample
- Comparisons of polydrug use at national and inner city levels in England
- Debt, common mental disorders and mental health service use
- Ethnic isolation and psychosis: re-examining the ethnic density effect
- Influence of perceived and actual neighbourhood disorder on common mental illness
- HERON
Conferences
- 6 June 2019: Andrew Barry, Vera Ehrenstein (UCL), Angeliki Balayannis (Exeter) and Emma Garnett (KCL), organised a workshop on The Chemical hosted by UCL
- 8 April 2019: Judy Green, Andy Guise, Fiona Stevenson (UCL) and Catherine Will (Sussex) organised the Sociological Contributions to Public Health Symposium, a one-day symposium to take forward work on strengthening the links between sociology and public health in the UK. This was supported by the SHI Foundation.
- 31 October 2018: Andrew Guise discusses a social science perspective on addressing homelessness and urban exclusion in London at the HERON Conference 2018.
- 22 June 2018: Professor Judith Green and Professor Steven Hoffman, scientific director of CIHR’s Institute of Population & Public Health, explore the implications of digital divides and digital connections for urban life and social policy at a half-day symposium hosted by the O’Brien Institute for Public Health. Key note given by Professor Green.
- 15 June 2018: Philip Corran and Emma Garnett speak on urban mobility and health at the European Sociological Association, Urban Sociology Conference in Madrid.
- 12-13 June 2018: Cities & Mental Health Conference This conference brought together different groups and other scholars working on related issues to discuss recent results, new methodologies and forms of interdisciplinary collaboration on the city/psychosis nexus.
- 26 April 2018: SUPHI Launch and public health workshop.
Contact us
If you would like to get in touch and/or become a member of the Social Science and Urban Public Health Institute contact: suphi@kcl.ac.uk