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Impact of the Built Environment on Health
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Impact of the Built Environment on Health

A special issue of International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (ISSN 1660-4601).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2024) | Viewed by 12485

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Teresa Cuerdo-Vilches

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Instituto de Ciencias de la Construcción Eduardo Torroja, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (IETcc-CSIC), 28033 Madrid, Spain
Interests: architecture; building engineering; habitability; health and environmental impacts; comfort, energy efficiency and savings; integration of renewable energy sources; housing renovation; innovative construction techniques; quantitative and qualitative research; sustainable development
Prof. Dr. Carmen Maria Muñoz-González

E-Mail Website
Co-Guest Editor
Departamento de Arte y Arquitectura, Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Málaga, Malaga, Spain
Interests: resilience; sustainability; indoor environment; climate change; building; built environments; passive measures; rehabilitation of heritage; energy; sustainable development
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Dr. María Luisa Gómez-Jiménez

E-Mail Website
Co-Guest Editor
IBYDA, Málaga University, 29010 Málaga, Spain
Interests: administrative law; urban law; housing policy; artificial intelligence; social policy; smart-cities

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

We spend around 90% of our time indoors, so the quality of these spaces affects both health and well-being. As recognized by the WHO, the design, performance and maintenance of buildings impacts the health of their occupants, potentially generating or worsening diseases. Overexposure to inappropriate indicators of indoor environmental quality (IEQ), such as thermal comfort, indoor air quality, noise, or the lack of daylight, conditions the quality of peoples’ life in the short, medium and long term, especially for vulnerable people. Other factors, such as ergonomics or safety of use, can also affect well-being when carrying out different daily tasks both in the home, workplace, schools, etc. Identifying, detecting and preventing health risks linked to buildings is therefore a priority to mitigate unwanted effects and multiple related impacts. Furthermore, extreme weather events and other health emergencies can cause even more devastating effects on people, as research has shown during the current COVID-19 pandemic. It is necessary to devise strategies and implement policies in that way.

This Special Issue aims to provide selected contributions on advances in relevance, interaction and impacts between the built environment and society, regarding health and well-being. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Basic habitability for all. Housing and the built environment as social determinants of inequities in health.
  • Indoor Environmental Quality (higrothermal comfort, natural and artificial lighting, indoor air quality and noise insulation). Indicators, monitoring, assessment and impacts on health.
  • Energy poverty/insecurity in households, vulnerability and effects.
  • Inclusive buildings; adaptation of homes to the elderly, people with disabilities and other social segments; accessibility, prevention of falls, etc.
  • Urban and rural territories: design, habitability, planning and adaptations to challenges.
  • Protection of the built environment against extreme climate events, and phenomena such as the heat urban island.
  • Remote work from home, risk factors, ergonomics, associated factors.
  • Housing and public health: chronicity, indicators related to epidemiological and domiciliary surveillance and monitoring, measures of social isolation, etc.
  • Adequacy of the housing stock for health requirements. Public policy requirements and regulations.

Dr. Teresa Cuerdo-Vilches
Dr. Carmen Maria Muñoz-González
Dr. María Luisa Gómez-Jiménez
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2500 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • housing
  • buildings
  • habitability
  • comfort
  • IEQ
  • social
  • adaptation
  • public policy
  • health emergency

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Published Papers (4 papers)

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Research

13 pages, 2025 KiB  
Article
Homelessness, Politics, and Policy: Predicting Spatial Variation in COVID-19 Cases and Deaths
by Hilary Silver and Rebecca Morris
Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2023, 20(4), 3265; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph20043265 - 13 Feb 2023
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2247
Abstract
When COVID-19 began to spread in the United States, the first public health orders were to hunker down at home. But for the vulnerable people experiencing homelessness, especially those sleeping outdoors, retreating to a private dwelling was not possible. This suggests that places [...] Read more.
When COVID-19 began to spread in the United States, the first public health orders were to hunker down at home. But for the vulnerable people experiencing homelessness, especially those sleeping outdoors, retreating to a private dwelling was not possible. This suggests that places with greater homelessness would also have elevated COVID-19 infections. This paper examines how spatial variation in unsheltered homelessness was related to the cumulative number of cases and deaths from COVID-19. Although Continuums of Care (CoCs) with more households receiving welfare, without internet service, and more disabled residents had a higher rate of COVID-19-related cases and deaths, CoCs with more unsheltered homelessness had fewer COVID-19-related deaths. More research is needed to explain this counterintuitive result, but it may reflect the bicoastal pattern of homelessness which is higher where government intervention, community sentiment, and compliance with rules to promote the common welfare are greater. In fact, local politics and policies mattered. CoCs with more volunteering and a higher share of votes for the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate also had fewer COVID-19 cases and deaths. Yet, other policies did not matter. Having more homeless shelter beds, publicly assisted housing units, residents in group quarters, or greater use of public transportation had no independent associations with pandemic outcomes. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Impact of the Built Environment on Health)
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18 pages, 2730 KiB  
Article
Impact of Correlated Color Temperature on Visitors’ Perception and Preference in Virtual Reality Museum Exhibitions
by Na Yu, Yue Lv, Xiaorong Liu, Shuai Jiang, Huixuan Xie, Xiaofan Zhang and Ke Xu
Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2023, 20(4), 2811; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph20042811 - 5 Feb 2023
Cited by 6 | Viewed by 3085
Abstract
From the perspective of psychophysiological evaluation, this paper provides a theoretical reference for the lighting settings of museums. In order to study the impact of correlated color temperature (CCT) on visitors’ perception and preference in museum exhibitions, an experiment was conducted in the [...] Read more.
From the perspective of psychophysiological evaluation, this paper provides a theoretical reference for the lighting settings of museums. In order to study the impact of correlated color temperature (CCT) on visitors’ perception and preference in museum exhibitions, an experiment was conducted in the ergonomics laboratory of Nanjing Forestry University. We invited 50 participants to visit the virtual reality museum exhibitions with different CCTs, built by Autodesk 3D’s Max 2017. Specific psychophysiology variables—eye movement, electrodermal activity (EDA), and heart rate variability (HRV)—and the perception and preference of participants were collected. The results indicated that the association of CCT with eye movement, HRV, and some perceptual dimensions was significant. Under high illumination conditions with different CCTs, the pupil diameter and warmth decreased with the increase in CCT, but the comfort and pleasure scores increased first and then decreased. The CCT scenes sorted by LF/HF ratio from high to low were 4500 K, 6000 K, and 3000 K, which was consistent with the results of preference ranking. The LF/HF ratio showed significant sex differences and major discrepancies. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Impact of the Built Environment on Health)
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28 pages, 16108 KiB  
Article
Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic in Classrooms at the University of the Basque Country through a User-Informed Natural Ventilation Demonstrator
by Iñigo Rodríguez-Vidal, Alexander Martín-Garín, Francisco González-Quintial, José Miguel Rico-Martínez, Rufino J. Hernández-Minguillón and Jorge Otaegi
Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2022, 19(21), 14560; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph192114560 - 6 Nov 2022
Cited by 9 | Viewed by 2646
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has generated a renewed interest in indoor air quality to limit viral spread. In the case of educational spaces, due to the high concentration of people and the fact that most of the existing buildings do not have any mechanical [...] Read more.
The COVID-19 pandemic has generated a renewed interest in indoor air quality to limit viral spread. In the case of educational spaces, due to the high concentration of people and the fact that most of the existing buildings do not have any mechanical ventilation system, the different administrations have established natural ventilation protocols to guarantee an air quality that reduces risk of contagion by the SARS-CoV-2 virus after the return to the classrooms. Many of the initial protocols established a ventilation pattern that opted for continuous or intermittent ventilation to varying degrees of intensity. This study, carried out on a university campus in Spain, analyses the performance of natural ventilation activated through the information provided by monitoring and visualisation of real-time data. In order to carry out this analysis, a experiment was set up where a preliminary study of ventilation without providing information to the users was carried out, which was then compared with the result of providing live feedback to the occupants of two classrooms and an administration office in different periods of 2020, 2021 and 2022. In the administration office, a CO2-concentration-based method was applied retrospectively to assess the risk of airborne infection. This experience has served as a basis to establish a route for user-informed improvement of air quality in educational spaces in general through low-cost systems that allow a rational use of natural ventilation while helping maintain an adequate compromise between IAQ, comfort and energy consumption, without having to resort to mechanical ventilation systems. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Impact of the Built Environment on Health)
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38 pages, 14979 KiB  
Article
Overview of the Role of Spatial Factors in Indoor SARS-CoV-2 Transmission: A Space-Based Framework for Assessing the Multi-Route Infection Risk
by Qi Zhen, Anxiao Zhang, Qiong Huang, Jing Li, Yiming Du and Qi Zhang
Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2022, 19(17), 11007; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph191711007 - 2 Sep 2022
Cited by 7 | Viewed by 3074
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has lasted from 2019 to 2022, severely disrupting human health and daily life. The combined effects of spatial, environmental, and behavioral factors on indoor COVID-19 spread and their interactions are usually ignored. Especially, there is a lack of discussion on [...] Read more.
The COVID-19 pandemic has lasted from 2019 to 2022, severely disrupting human health and daily life. The combined effects of spatial, environmental, and behavioral factors on indoor COVID-19 spread and their interactions are usually ignored. Especially, there is a lack of discussion on the role of spatial factors in reducing the risk of virus transmission in complex and diverse indoor environments. This paper endeavours to summarize the spatial factors and their effects involved in indoor virus transmission. The process of release, transport, and intake of SARS-CoV-2 was reviewed, and six transmission routes according to spatial distance and exposure way were classified. The triangular relationship between spatial, environmental and occupant behavioral parameters during virus transmission was discussed. The detailed effects of spatial parameters on droplet-based, surface-based and air-based transmission processes and virus viability were summarized. We found that spatial layout, public-facility design and openings have a significant indirect impact on the indoor virus distribution and transmission by affecting occupant behavior, indoor airflow field and virus stability. We proposed a space-based indoor multi-route infection risk assessment framework, in which the 3D building model containing detailed spatial information, occupant behavior model, virus-spread model and infection-risk calculation model are linked together. It is also applicable to other, similar, respiratory infectious diseases such as SARS, influenza, etc. This study contributes to developing building-level, infection-risk assessment models, which could help building practitioners make better decisions to improve the building’s epidemic-resistance performance. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Impact of the Built Environment on Health)
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