Researchers at LISA publish new research in Progress in Planning

Researchers from the Lab of Interdisciplinary Spatial Analysis (LISA) have published a review monograph in Progress in Planning that examines determinants of health within urban health policy discourse. The study, titled “Mapping urban health policies: A scoping review of environmental, behavioural and socioeconomic determinants of health” is first-authored by Ana Paula Seraphim, PhD candidate in the Department of Land Economy. Professor Elisabete A. Silva and Dr Haifeng Niu of LISA are co-authors of the study. This research is linked to the EU Horizon 2020 project 'Emotional Cities WP4: Spatial Analysis of Urban Health', led by Professor Silva.

Access to urban health policies in a structured and systematised format remains a significant challenge within the scientific community focusing on urban health. Through content analysis methods, this study systematically examined 128 policy documents spanning intergovernmental, national, regional, and local governance levels. The analysis focused on the World and European regions, with specific attention to the cities of London, Lisbon, and Copenhagen, covering the period from 2010 to 2022. Key highlights include:

Air Pollution is the most mentioned (77.5 %) environmental Determinant of Health in policy.
Physical activity and play are the most mentioned (73.2 %) behavioural Determinant of Health in policy.
Children and adolescents are the most mentioned (74.6 %) socioeconomic Determinant of Health in policy.
Urban Health agenda documents focus more on physical health than mental health outcomes.
There is a lack of comprehensive intersectoral collaboration at the local level in urban health policy agenda documents.

Review Determinants of health model (Seraphim et al., 2025)

The abstract of the review monograph reads as follows:

“Researchers have consistently shown that determinants of health—factors beyond healthcare, including the built environment and socioeconomic conditions— significantly impact health outcomes. This understanding has led to a growing trend in recent decades towards policy discourse that links determinants of health with health outcomes. However, the scientific community's access to these policies in a structured and systematised manner remains limited. The importance of this gap cannot be overstated, as information about which determinants of health are discussed and prioritised in policy agendas is spread across various documents from different organisations, making it difficult to address relevant policy questions promptly. A scoping review of urban health policies was conducted following JBI guidelines to bridge this gap. The aim was to create a structured framework that outlines the environmental, behavioural, and socioeconomic determinants of health included in policy agendas, as well as how they are understood and prioritised, their relationships with each other and with health outcomes, and how they vary across different geographic and governance levels. Using content analysis methods, 128 policy documents from intergovernmental, national, regional, and local governance levels were analysed, covering the World and European region and the cities of London, Lisbon, and Copenhagen from 2010 to 2022. The review identified 83 determinants of health employed in policy discourse, categorising them into nine priority themes: healthy diet; drug, alcohol, and tobacco; social cohesion; physical activity; safety; active travel; natural and open spaces; environmental exposures; and basic services. These determinants of health were organised in a structured framework to illustrate their perceived relationships with each other, the priority themes, and health outcomes, as well as their prioritisation in policy discourse based on their frequency of use in urban health policy. This review represents the first comprehensive scope of how determinants of health are employed in policy discourse. The resulting conceptual framework offers a remarkably comprehensive mapping of the systemic relations between determinants of health and health outcomes, which forms a valuable tool for guiding research and practice on the policy-suggested complex multivariate causal pathways between variables. This framework provides a foundation for systematically exploring previously challenging questions, such as how research evidence is being translated into policy discourse and which aspects of this discourse are being implemented into action. Moreover, the scoping review and content analysis protocol can be replicated in other geographic regions, providing insights into potential outcome variations.”