Shifting the Paradigm: Estimating Heterogeneous Treatment Effects in the Development of Walkable Cities Design

The transformation of urban environments to accommodate growing populations has profoundly impacted public health and well-being. This paper addresses the critical challenge of estimating the impact of urban design interventions on diverse populations. Traditional approaches, reliant on questionnaires and stated preference techniques, are limited by recall bias and capturing the complex dynamics between environmental attributes and individual characteristics. To address these challenges, we integrate Virtual Reality (VR) with observational causal inference methods to estimate heterogeneous treatment effects, specifically employing Targeted Maximum Likelihood Estimation (TMLE) for its robustness against model misspecification. Our innovative approach leverages VR-based experiment to collect data that reflects perceptual and experiential factors. The result shows the heterogeneous impacts of urban design elements on public health and underscore the necessity for personalized urban design interventions. This study not only extends the application of TMLE to built environment research but also informs public health policy by illuminating the nuanced effects of urban design on mental well-being and advocating for tailored strategies that foster equitable, health-promoting urban spaces.