Introduction

This chapter provides an overview of the background and content of this book. Starting with a discussion on the recent edited volumes on or closely related to urban health, this chapter highlights the need for a book on geospatial technologies for the study of urban health. The uniqueness of geospatial approaches to investigate urban health issues can be attributed to the spatial perspective and the lens of place. This chapter further argues that the continuous development in geospatial technologies, coupled with recent advances in communication and information technologies, portable sensor technologies, and the various social media and open data, has played an essential role for the modelling of environment exposure and health risk. However, there still exist challenges for urban health studies. These challenges maybe rooted in, among the multiple causes, a lack of understanding of the micro-level health decisions and the methodological limitation to address the Uncertain Geospatial Contextual Problem. This chapter finishes with a section-by-section and chapter-by-chapter overview of the empirical studies included in this book volume. This overview is provided to illustrate the organization of this book and to serve as a guide for a reader to navigate through the book chapters.