Fundamental Approaches to Studying the Impact of the Urban Environment on Public Health: History and Current State

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Despite a half-century history of studying the city as a living environment, the majority of research remains focused on the pathogenic factors of urbanization—pollution, stressogenicity, and the spread of infections. However, this approach leaves a key question unanswered: why, under identical urban conditions, do some individuals maintain a high level of health and well-being while others lose it? Paradoxically, the positive resources of the urban environment itself and the resilience mechanisms of its inhabitants have long remained on the periphery of scientific analysis. For the first time in the Russian scientific literature, this article offers a systematic analysis of Aaron Antonovsky's salutogenic approach as an alternative lens for investigating the "city–health" relationship. As a result of a search and analytical review encompassing a corpus of 70 key publications in international databases, three principal directions for applying salutogenesis to urban themes were identified: first, the reconceptualization of urban stressors as potentially salutogenic challenges; second, the operationalization of the "sense of coherence" (SOC) in relation to the urban lifeworld; and, third, the formation of principles for the salutogenic design of public spaces. Special attention is devoted to the transformation of these ideas in the era of digitalization, wherein the digital urban environment becomes simultaneously a generalized resistance resource and a source of new entropy. It is demonstrated that the COVID-19 pandemic paradoxically actualized the salutogenic agenda, shifting the focus from mere survival to the search for community resilience resources. From reading the full text of the article, the reader will gain, for the first time, not merely a historical and theoretical overview of the evolution of the salutogenic model, but also a holistic conceptual framework for its application in urban studies, as well as a critical analysis of the potential and limitations of this approach within the Russian context of urban environment design and digital healthcare. Engaging with this work will allow one to rethink conventional notions of the city as exclusively a source of risks and to see it as a space for fostering resilience, meaningfulness, and health.