Lauwers, L., Leone, M., Guyot, M., Pelgrims, I., Remmen, R., Van den Broeck, K., Keune, H. and Bastiaens, H. (2021) ‘Exploring how the urban neighborhood environment influences mental well-being using walking interviews’, Health & Place, 67, 102497. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2020.102497.

Lauwers and colleagues make the neighbourhood legible as an interacting socioecological field rather than as a container of isolated environmental variables. Through semi-structured walking interviews with residents of the Brussels-Capital Region, the study connects green-blue spaces, services, design, maintenance and traffic with neighbour ties, diversity, social security and institutional conditions. Its methodological importance lies in walking as situated elicitation: environmental meanings emerge while participants encounter the places to which their accounts refer, reducing the distance between abstract recollection and spatial experience. The theoretical contribution is equally significant because mental well-being is treated as relational, produced through interactions among physical, social, personal and institutional factors rather than attributed to a single environmental exposure. This allows the neighbourhood to be understood as lived configuration. The wider bridge reaches environmental psychology, qualitative urban research and participatory planning, where attachment, safety, everyday routines and spatial affordances can be studied as mutually conditioning dimensions of urban life.