Health in the Urban Environment: Exploring residents’ views and system understandings within the apartment living context in Sydney, Australia, using a complex systems health and wellbeing framework
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2024
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This empirical study contributes to knowledge of healthy high-density apartment living in Sydney, Australia. Today, many factors, problems, and trends influence health and wellbeing within urban environments. These complex factors ultimately coalesce and influence health at the apartment building level. To understand this complexity, gaining residents’ perceptions is crucial as it brings contextual and local knowledge that is relevant to the place they occupy. The research described here examines what and how residents of apartment buildings perceive influences of health and wellbeing in this complex urban environment. Using a qualitative pragmatic approach informed by interpretivism and systems thinking, the research collected data from diverse residents of high-density apartment buildings (four storeys and above) across Sydney. Seventeen residents from different demographics, apartment buildings, and suburbs participated in the research following extensive field visits across the city. Semi-structured interviews with 17 existing residents were the primary data source, and photographs narrated by two residents. Using a conceptual framework informed by complex systems and ecological thinking of health and factors, this study demonstrates a complex understanding by residents of health and wellbeing influences at the apartment building level. Residents associated health and wellbeing with 20 different areas of health and wellbeing influence covering residents, society, built environment, natural environment, stressors, and tenancy. With further synthesis, residents’ perceptions revealed five layers of complexity to this understanding. Residents’ views showed a diverse, context-dependent, multilevel, and permeating nature to these health and wellbeing influences. These influences were perceived as linked and interdependent in a tangled web. Understanding what influences health and wellbeing and how these influences interact in urban living environments using complex systems and ecological thinking is critical for research, practice, and policy. For practice, the findings hold particular significance in the context of high-density residential developments, as they establish, for the first time, a baseline map of health and wellbeing influences identified by apartment building residents. For policy-making, the five complexity layers offer an educational framework and a guide to designing policies that promote healthy apartment living. Furthermore, the 20 areas of influence and the five extrapolated layers of complexity provide new empirical knowledge for advancing research on healthy apartment living. They also demonstrate the value and criticality of employing pragmatic, qualitative, creative, residents’-based research that is informed by complex systems and ecological thinking for healthy urban development.
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