REP Research Seminar - Presenting in person - Dr Helen Zheng from the University of Manchester. Title: Beyond the Neighbourhood: Street-Level Environments, Urban Health and Spatial Inequalities

Abstract:

The built environment plays an important role in shaping urban health, yet much of the existing research relies on neighbourhood-level indicators that may overlook the characteristics of streets experienced in everyday life. Recent advances in street-view imagery and artificial intelligence offer new opportunities to capture these micro-scale environments and examine their relationships with health outcomes.

This seminar draws on two recent studies investigating the relationships between street-level environment and obesity in Greater Manchester and Toronto. The first develops a scalable GeoAI framework integrating street-view imagery, deep learning and explainable machine learning to examine how associations between street characteristics and obesity vary across urban contexts. The second focuses on Greater Manchester, exploring differences in street environments between the most and least deprived neighbourhoods and how environmental characteristics are associated with obesity across these contexts.

Together, the studies highlight the importance of considering street-level environments alongside conventional neighbourhood characteristics, while revealing the context-dependent nature of environment–health relationships. The seminar will discuss the opportunities and challenges of using emerging urban data and AI methods to inform more context-sensitive and equitable spatial planning.

Bio: Dr Helen Zheng is a Senior Lecturer in Spatial Planning and Coordinator of the Spatial Policy and Analysis Laboratory (SPA Lab) research group at the University of Manchester. Her research focuses on spatial inequalities and their relationships with urban environments, infrastructure, human behaviour and planning policies. She uses geospatial analysis, GeoAI and mixed methods to investigate inequalities across places, with particular interests in urban health, mobility and the low carbon transition. Her work aims to provide evidence to support more equitable and sustainable spatial planning and decision-making.