SURREAL – Making Urban Health more Inclusive

Cities play an important role in their inhabitants’ health and wellbeing through complex interactions between people and the social, cultural, physical and economic aspects of the urban environment. One can, for example, think of: the effects of air pollution on the lungs, heart and blood vessels; advertisements, stores and snack bars stimulating (un)healthy diets; and safe green spaces and bike lanes enabling people to be physically active. In these ways, cities also play a role in the existence of health inequities and inequalities: some parts of the city, inhabited by people with certain shared circumstances (e.g. a low income), may systematically have more features promoting an unhealthy lifestyle and contributing to ill-health and disease, compared to other parts of the city. Furthermore, cities influence our health continuously throughout the lifespan: when we are children, adults, elderly, and even when we are still in the womb. The totality of all exposures a person is exposed to over their lifetime, is referred to as the exposome. 

SURREAL is an Innovative Training Network (ITN) funded by Marie Curie, in which 15 ‘early stage’ researchers investigate different aspects of the relations between the urban environment and health, through their 15 individual research projects. This interdisciplinary research network has a special focus on health inequalities, the exposome and the urban health system. One of the individual research projects is carried out by Wageningen University & Research (chairgroup Consumption and Healthy Lifestyles), and focuses on a neighborhood in the city of Utrecht. It is a participatory neighborhood-based research project, in which local adolescents’ perceptions of health and healthy living, alongside their impressions of how their neighborhood impacts their health and lifestyle behaviors, are explored. The main aim of the project is to co-create actions with the adolescents that will contribute to their healthy living.

The individual research project, as part of the ITN SURREAL, runs from September 2021 to September 2024. The research project happens in collaboration with the municipality of Utrecht and with great support and active contribution from different local organizations.

More information? Click here.