Urban street landscape and well-being in Brussels

Urban landscapes are the backdrop of life in more than half of the world population. The streets and public spaces provide the setting for urban activities, with buildings, gardens and parks as background. The layout of this urban street landscape influences our way of perceiving the city but also, more broadly, affects well-being. To support this assumption, it is necessary to well characterize the urban fabrics in order to link it with well-being. Finding the spatial unit at the right scale has always been a challenge for spatial analysts. Administrative partitions (wards, municipalities) often do not match with urban landscapes: each spatial unit is heterogeneous in terms of built-up and not built-up surfaces hence not fitting with further spatial statistical analyses. Araldi and Fusco (2017) have developed a new method - Multiple Fabric Assessment method (MFA) - with the idea of characterizing urban fabrics as they are perceived by the pedestrians freely moving on the streets, so from the road network. The original MFA method does not include any vegetation indicator, while the beneficial impacts of urban green spaces on psychological, emotional and mental health has already led to numerous analyses. The MFA method is applied to Brussels (Belgium). The basic spatial unit (Proximity Bands) is first defined around each street segment. Each Proximity Bands unit is further described by 21 geometrical and spatial indicators of urban form as perceived by the city user; three of them are related to vegetation. Geostatistic analyses (ILINCS) are then achieved to identify local patterns of urban form features. Finally, Bayesian clustering is carried out to identify and describe family of urban fabrics. The application of this variant of the MFA method makes it possible to highlight twelve family of urban fabrics in Brussels. This result highlights elements specific to the city's history, such as bruxellisation - destruction of part of the historic center to build offices - and garden cities. This typology of urban fabrics is then linked to mental health and well-being. Two types of analysis are carried out: a qualitative and a quantitative one. The qualitative analysis consist in walking interviews and mapping exercises with forty Brussels residents. The typology enabled us to define the interviews places in order to explore a different range of urban fabrics. In the quantitative analysis, Health Interview Survey (HIS) data are used to investigate the relationships between mental health and the built/non-built environment, while accounting for demographic, socioeconomic factors, lifestyle, air and noise pollution. These two analyses are ongoing and the first results will be discussed