Green space & community connection: combined conduits to health.

So far, we’ve found that community connection and proximity to public green space separately improve people’s mental and physical health… but more recent complex research has shown how the two may interact to create further positive outcomes.

Social cohesion and connection is now understood as a possible underlying component of green space’s positive association with physical health. The most clarified of these models characterises public green spaces as local ‘hubs’…

A green space is often a social space where community contact and interaction builds social networks that are more likely to incentivise positive health behaviours such as exercise – and decrease the likelihood of negative health behaviours such as smoking (Drieskens et al., 2021; Markevych et al., 2017).

Most significantly, as well as contributing to the improvement of the health and wellbeing of people, green spaces often engender pride in neighbourhoods that leads to even more community-driven investment in such spaces. Thus, a virtuous circle begins to appear. This demonstrates how access to both green space and the local community have to be considered as inextricably intertwined when it comes to mental and physical health benefits.

The combined interaction. Four themes from individual interviews.