Department of Sociology, The University of British Columbia, V6T 1Z1, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
Soc Sci Med. 2018 Jan;196:1-9. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2017.10.035. Epub 2017 Nov 7.
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.
城市治理及其对争议政治的影响在现有的心理健康研究中得到的关注甚少。本文利用在中国广州市 39 个城市社区调查中开发的邻里冲突衡量指标，探讨了城市治理与心理健康之间的潜在联系。在控制了社会人口统计学、关系和环境因素后，研究发现，在居民与城市治理的不同实体之间的冲突中，只有与地方/基层政府的冲突与更多的抑郁症状显著相关。此外，与更多抑郁症状相关的这些面向政府的冲突亚组与邻里规划和公共财产有关，反映了中国城市治理模式的困境。通过对邻里冲突进行关系解释，本研究不仅挑战了中国社区建设改善心理健康的观点，而且还引起了人们对城市治理在心理健康研究中的重要性的关注。
