Nature & neighbourhood: a network to nurture. Part 1: green space.
Whether it’s a woodland or park, allotment development or ‘pocket patch of grass’…
…the myriad benefits of public green spaces have been proven to contribute to the economic value of cities. (Lovell & Taylor, 2013)
It’s intuitive to us all that spending time in nature is good for you.
Mood, motivation, health and human connection can all be positively influenced by surrounding ourselves with the good – green! – stuff.
So, it’s no surprise that in a time of continuing urbanisation, there is an increasing focus on developing attractive and healthy urban environments.
But how does green space actually make people happier and healthier?
What's going on...
For the past two decades, researchers have attempted to understand the causal routes behind the – often astounding – effects of access to green space…
As you might imagine, people who spend more time in green spaces are likely to have less exposure to air pollution – an immediate health benefit. But we now also understand that wellbeing and mental health can have profound effects on general health… While some people may go to a park to escape their daily routine and get fresh air, others use nature to challenge themselves and get fit, and many gain comfort from interacting with or just observing nature and wildlife. Together, the combination of these different (direct and indirect) outcomes create a complex but complementary cluster of physical health and mental wellbeing benefits.
91%
of people say local green spaces improve their quality of life
Proximity: perceived matters more than measured?
Some of the most interesting findings in this field relate to subjective versus objective access to public green spaces. A group of researchers in the Netherlands found that people who think of their local green spaces as more accessible and usable felt more satisfied with their neighbourhood, which was then associated with higher levels of reported happiness and mental health. Similarly for physical health, an eight-country comparison study demonstrated that even just someone’s perceived proximity to a park (i.e., how many minutes they believed it took to walk there) was positively associated with a variety of exercise outcomes: frequency, intensity and type (Schipperijn et al., 2017).
Seven out of ten UK parents with young children are concerned that local government budget cuts will have a negative impact on parks and green spaces – areas that might be their child’s only gateway to green space access.
When it comes to influencing physical behaviour, exercise (and its subsequent health benefits) is one of the most expected potential from close proximity to public green space, but a few surprising others arise too. We know that neighbourhood environments – their safety and accessibility among other factors – can influence residents’ daily behaviours related to health. A recent systematic US study found exercise, but notably also smoking and alcohol consumption, are the health behaviours most likely to be influenced by a person’s access to public green space (Sugiyama et al., 2018; Penbrooke et al., 2022).
As one of the biggest predictors of health issues in later life, smoking is one of the key health habits UK policy actively aims to eliminate. Across the adult population there is a lower prevalence of smoking among individuals living in the highest green-space quartile, relative to those who live in the lowest quartile (Martin et al., 2020). This is likely to explain why people residing close to green spaces have a 13% lower rate of cancer death. Similarly, for those who do smoke, intensity is likely to be lower when living closer to neighbourhood green space (Astell-Burt et al., 2014; Van Herzele & de Vries, 2011). Notably this is something that occurs even when socio-economic factors are accounted for, which strongly suggests that the association is independent of people’s demographic, education, and income at both individual and local community level. Researchers presenting these findings have posited a variety of potential reasons for this independent correlation – from green space reducing stress (and therefore subsequent smoking) levels, to people near green spaces being more likely to take up social activities that disincentivise smoking – and efforts to further explore these prospective explanations continue to this day (Schipperijn et al., 2017).
