Multilevel Perspectives on Urban Health

Abstract

The production of health in cities is driven by a range of features of the urban environment, including characteristics of interpersonal interactions, of neighborhoods, and of entire cities themselves as well as citywide policies. This rests directly on multilevel causal frameworks that aim to understand how forces at different levels of influence and produce health. This approach, now firmly embedded in many quantitative social sciences, provides a conceptual and analytical framework through which we can understand the production of health in cities. This chapter introduces a multilevel approach and its attendant methods to the end of understanding core questions in urban health.