Bringing urban governance back in: Neighborhood conflicts and depression

Qiang Fu

Social Science & Medicine, 2018, vol. 196, issue C, 1-9

Abstract: Urban governance and its impact on contentious politics have received remarkably little attention in existing studies on mental health. Drawing on a measure of neighborhood conflicts developed in a survey of thirty-nine urban neighborhoods in Guangzhou, China, this article investigates the potential link between urban governance and mental health. Net of sociodemographic, relational, and environmental measures, it finds that among residents' conflicts with different entities of urban governance, only those with local/grassroots governments are significantly associated with more depressive symptoms. Moreover, these subgroups of government-oriented conflicts associated with more depressive symptoms are related to neighborhood planning and communal properties, reflecting a dilemma in the Chinese model of urban governance. By offering a relational interpretation of neighborhood conflicts, this study not only challenges the previous view that community building in China improves mental health, but calls attention to the significance of urban governance in research on mental health.

Keywords: Depression; Neighborhood conflicts; Urban transformation; Community building; Relations; Urban governance; Contentious politics; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953617306524
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:socmed:v:196:y:2018:i:c:p:1-9

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
http://www.elsevier. ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2017.10.035

Access Statistics for this article

Social Science & Medicine is currently edited by Ichiro (I.) Kawachi and S.V. (S.V.) Subramanian

More articles in Social Science & Medicine from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().