Place and the Social-Spatial Determinants of Health

This open access contributed volume is the first to address Social Determinants of Health (SDoH) from a place-based perspective with a transdisciplinary, global outlook. In this open access book, experts from geography, public health, urban planning, sociology, architecture, and more respond to growing calls for action on SDoH to improve health outcomes and promote health equity. Through theoretical considerations and case studies, the book explores how a spatial perspective influences, expands, and enriches understanding of SDoH across different scales and applications. Failing to account for patterns of structural health factors using an explicitly spatial approach can lead to biased, misinterpreted, or incomplete analyses. Adopting a geographic, place-based perspective remains crucial for SDoH studies from theoretical, analytical, and technological standpoints. The chapters in this book highlight areas needing further attention, such as spatial mismatch in health services, the complexities of social and spatial networks, and the impact of government policies on health disparities. Guided by SDoH frameworks, the book is divided into the sections on conceptualizing Social-Spatial Determinants of Health (S&SDoH), integrating S&SDoH in practice, methodological approaches and techniques for measuring S&SDoH, and empirical illustrations of S&SDoH.

Marynia A. Kolak, Ph.D., M.F.A., M.S. is a health geographer and spatial epidemiologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she leads the Healthy Regions & Policies Lab. Her research explores how "place" impacts health outcomes, integrating a socio-ecological view of health, spatial data science, and community-centered design to investigate regional and neighborhood health equity. Kolak received the Emerging Scholar Award in Health Geography in 2022.   Imelda K. Moise, PhD, MPH is a health geographer and Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Miami, Florida. She directs the Geography of Inequalities Lab (GaIL) and the Global Health Studies program at the same institution. Dr. Moise is renowned for her research on at-risk families and communities, utilizing mixed methods, particularly geospatial analysis, to investigate health inequities. She also serves on the Editorial Board of the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, where she contributes to the Geographic Methods section.