Neighbourhoods act on wellbeing through capacities distributed across social relations, material form, habitual movement and the meanings attached to everyday places. This makes the neighbourhood neither a passive container nor a simple exposure variable. It is an environment whose effects emerge through use, recognition, accessibility, sociality and the possibility of forming durable relations with people and settings. Charlotte Wendelboe-Nelson and colleagues demonstrate this in their mixed-methods evaluation of outdoor health interventions for refugees, migrants and asylum-seekers. Walking and cycling in outdoor environments produced benefits that standard wellbeing scales only partially captured, while qualitative work revealed the social component of shared activity as critical.
