Public parks guaranteeing sustainable well-being

May 27, 2020

Science Daily/Université de Genève

An international team led by the University of Geneva (UNIGE) has ascertained how green spaces contribute to the well-being of city-dwellers. The research shows that parks play an essential role in the well-being of individuals, regardless of their social class, and that they cannot be replaced by other venues where people meet, such as shopping centers. When these parks are closed -- as during the COVID-19 pandemic -- it intensifies inequalities in well-being.

Public parks are many things to many people: a space devoid of domestic chores and patriarchal expectations, a spot to cultivate friendship or love, a place where you can experience a feeling of freedom that is absent elsewhere, an opportunity to "visit" trees from a country you have not seen in a long time, a way of being part of a group while sitting alone on your bench -- or even the perfect setting for running a small business to help you get by. Public parks are all this and much more if we're to believe the inhabitants of four Asian mega-cities -- Chennai, Singapore, Manila and Shanghai -- who were interviewed as part of a recently-published study. Green spaces, we learn, do much more than simply benefit biodiversity and health: they also meet numerous other essential human needs that open the door to sustainable well-being, a concept based on a combination of personal well-being and the necessities of sustainable development.

"There are many theories that try to define human well-being," begins Marlyne Sahakian, a professor in the Department of Sociology in UNIGE's Faculty of Social Sciences and the study's first author. "Instead of using subjective notions such as happiness, we used a list of nine 'protected needs' that has recently been developed by colleagues from the University of Basel. These needs correspond to what society can offer the population through the public sector. This list of protected needs is the result of an analysis of the scientific literature and was validated among the Swiss population and by panels of experts."

The nine capital needs

In concrete terms, the list is made up of the following nine items: (1) the availability of goods that satisfy vital needs; (2) turning your own idea of everyday life into reality; (3) living in a pleasant environment; (4) growing as a person; (5) self-determination; (6) doing activities that you value; (7) being part of a community; (8) taking part in decisions about the future of society; and (9) being protected by society.

Armed with this list, researchers from the four Asian cities, co-signatories of the study, asked residents about their use of public parks and the benefits they derived from them. An analysis of their responses first showed that ordinary people can assess their well-being using these protected needs, making the distinction between what they need and what they want. "This suggests that meeting human needs is a societal goal that can be discussed by diverse groups of people around the world," says Professor Sahakian before adding: "This has implications for city planning measures designed to ensure everyone's sustainable well-being for today and tomorrow. In the cities of South Asia in particular, parks -- which offer a naturally cool, shaded microclimate -- are a precious alternative to other leisure spaces, such as air-conditioned shopping centres."

Inclusion rather than exclusion

The research, which was supported by the Swiss Network for International Studies, also found that the use of green spaces fulfils all the protected needs to a certain degree. Three of these needs (3, 4 and 7) however, have a score that is significantly higher than the others.

"Going to the park is a social activity that requires more than just a green space, argues Professor Sahakian. People do different kinds of things in parks to meet the same need, such as exercising, chatting with other people, reading a book, meeting a group or learning about biodiversity. These are very inclusive spaces, where there is ready access for everyone, unlike what happens in shopping centres, which can operate quite a strong form of social segregation. In the immediate context of a post-COVID-19 environment, where public spending will probably be more limited than before, it is all the more important to maintain the infrastructure of the parks (water access points, toilets, trails, etc.) and to ensure access so that they can continue to meet everyone's needs."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/05/200527105025.htm

City parks lift mood as much as Christmas

The greener the greenspace, the happier and less self-absorbed people are

August 20, 2019

Science Daily/University of Vermont

New research shows that visitors to urban parks use happier words and express less negativity on Twitter than before their visit -- and that their elevated mood lasts for up to four hours. The effect is so strong that it's equivalent to the mood spike on Christmas, the happiest day each year on Twitter. With increasing urbanization and mood disorders, this research may have powerful implications for public health and urban planning.

Feeling unhappy and cranky? The treatment: take a walk under some trees in the park.

That may not be the exact prescription of your doctor, but a first-of-its-kind study shows that visitors to urban parks use happier words and express less negativity on Twitter than they did before their visit -- and that their elevated mood lasts, like a glow, for up to four hours afterwards.

The effect is so strong -- a team of scientists from the University of Vermont discovered -- that the increase in happiness from a visit to an outpost of urban nature is equivalent to the mood spike on Christmas, by far the happiest day each year on Twitter.

With more people living in cities, and growing rates of mood disorders, this research may have powerful implications for public health and urban planning.

The new study was published August 20 in People and Nature, an open-access journal of the British Ecological Society.

GREEN MATTERS

For three months, a team of scientists from the University of Vermont studied hundreds of tweets per day that people posted from 160 parks in San Francisco. "We found that, yes, across all the tweets, people are happier in parks," says Aaron Schwartz, a UVM graduate student who led the new research, "but the effect was stronger in large regional parks with extensive tree cover and vegetation." Smaller neighborhood parks showed a smaller spike in positive mood and mostly-paved civic plazas and squares showed the least mood elevation.

In other words, it's not just getting out of work or being outside that brings a positive boost: the study shows that greener areas with more vegetation have the biggest impact. It's notable that one of the words that shows the biggest uptick in use in tweets from parks is "flowers."

"In cities, big green spaces are very important for people's sense of well-being," says Schwartz; meaning that efforts to protect and expand urban natural areas extend far beyond luxury and second-tier concerns -- "we're seeing more and more evidence that it's central to promoting mental health," says Taylor Ricketts, a co-author on the new study and director of the Gund Institute for Environment at UVM.

In recent years, "a big focus in conservation has been on monetary benefits -- like: how many dollars of flood damage did we avoid by restoring a wetland?" Ricketts says. "But this study is part of a new wave of research that expands beyond monetary benefits to quantify the direct health benefits of nature. What's even more innovative here is our focus on mental health benefits -- which have been really underappreciated and understudied."

MEASURING HAPPINESS

The new study relied on the hedonometer. This online instrument -- invented by a team of scientists at UVM and The MITRE Corporation, including Chris Danforth and Peter Dodds, professors at UVM's Complex Systems Center and co-authors on the new study -- has been gathering and analyzing billions of tweets for more than a decade, resulting in numerous scientific papers and extensive global media coverage. The instrument uses a body of about 10,000 common words that have been scored by a large pool of volunteers for what the scientists call their "psychological valence," a kind of measure of each word's emotional temperature.

The volunteers ranked words they perceived as the happiest near the top of a 1-9 scale; sad words near the bottom. Averaging the volunteers' responses, each word received a score: "happy" itself ranked 8.30, "hahaha" 7.94, and "parks" 7.14. Truly neutral words, "and" and "the" scored 5.22 and 4.98. At the bottom, "trapped" 3.08, "crash" 2.60, and "jail" 1.76. "Flowers" scored a pleasant 7.56.

Using these scores, the team collects some fifty million tweets from around the world each day -- "then we basically toss all the words into a huge bucket," says Dodds -- and calculate the bucket's average happiness score.

PARK POSITION

To make the new study, the UVM team fished tweets out of this huge stream -- from 4,688 users who publically identify their location -- that were geotagged with latitude and longitude in the city of San Francisco. This allowed the team to know which tweets were coming from which parks. "Then, working with the U.S. Forest Service, we developed some new techniques for mapping vegetation of urban areas -- at a very detailed resolution, about a thousand times more detailed than existing methods," says Jarlath O'Neil-Dunne, director of UVM's Spatial Analysis Laboratory in the UVM Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources and a co-author on the new study. "That's what really enabled us to get an accurate understanding of how the greenness and vegetation of these urban areas relates to people's sentiment there."

"This is the first study that uses Twitter to examine how user sentiment changes before, during, and after visits to different types of parks," says Schwartz, a doctoral student in the Rubenstein School and Gund Institute graduate fellow. "The greener parks show a bigger boost."

Overall, the tweets posted from these urban parks in San Francisco were happier by a dramatic 0.23 points on the hedonometer scale over the baseline. "This increase in sentiment is equivalent to that of Christmas Day for Twitter as a whole in the same year," the scientists write.

THE CAUSE OF AFFECT

"Being in nature offers restorative benefits on dimensions not available for purchase in a store, or downloadable on a screen," says UVM's Chris Danforth, a professor of mathematics and fellow in the Gund Institute. He notes that a growing body of research shows an association between time in nature and improved mood, "but the specific causal links are hard to nail down."

The team of UVM scientists consider several possible mechanisms through which urban nature may improve mental health, including Green Mind Theory that suggests that the negativity bias of the brain, "which may have been evolutionarily advantageous -- is constantly activated by the stressors of modern life," the team writes.

"While we don't address causality in our study, we do find that negative language -- like 'not,' 'no,' 'don't,' 'can't,' -- decreased in the period immediately after visits to urban parks," says Danforth, "offering specific linguistic markers of the mood boost available outside." Conversely, the study shows that the use of first-person pronouns -- "I" and "me" -- drops off dramatically in parks, perhaps indicating "a shift from individual to collective mental frame," the scientists write.

Of course, Twitter users are not a representative sample of all people -- just who are the "twitter-afflicted" (as Adam Gopnik wrote in a recent issue of the New Yorker) who pick up their phone to tweet from a park? Still, Twitter users are a broad demographic, earlier research shows, and this approach to near-real-time remote sensing via Twitter posts -- not based on self-reporting -- gives a new window for scientists onto the shifting moods of very large groups.

The nature of happiness has been pondered by philosophers for centuries and studied by psychologists for decades, but this new study suggests it might be as clear as that: in nature, people tend to be more happy -- and that's a finding "that may help public health officials and governments make plans and investments," says UVM's Aaron Schwartz.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190820081859.htm

Being surrounded by green space in childhood may improve mental health of adults

February 26, 2019

Science Daily/Aarhus University

Children who grow up with greener surroundings have up to 55 percent less risk of developing various mental disorders later in life. This is shown by a new study emphasizing the need for designing green and healthy cities for the future.

A larger and larger share of the world's population now lives in cities and WHO estimates that more than 450 millions of the global human population suffer from a mental disorder. A number that is expected to increase.

Now, based on satellite data from 1985 to 2013, researchers from Aarhus University have mapped the presence of green space around the childhood homes of almost one million Danes and compared this data with the risk of developing one of 16 different mental disorders later in life.

The study, which is published today in the Journal PNAS, shows that children surrounded by the high amounts of green space in childhood have up to a 55% lower risk of developing a mental disorder -- even after adjusting for other known risk factors such as socio-economic status, urbanization, and the family history of mental disorders.

The entire childhood must be green

Postdoc Kristine Engemann from Department of Bioscience and the National Centre for Register-based Research at Aarhus University, who spearheaded the study, says: "Our data is unique. We have had the opportunity to use a massive amount of data from Danish registers of, among other things, residential location and disease diagnoses and compare it with satellite images revealing the extent of green space surrounding each individual when growing up."

Researchers know that, for example, noise, air pollution, infections and poor socio-economic conditions increase the risk of developing a mental disorder. Conversely, other studies have shown that more green space in the local area creates greater social cohesion and increases people's physical activity level and that it can improve children's cognitive development. These are all factors that may have an impact on people's mental health.

"With our dataset, we show that the risk of developing a mental disorder decreases incrementally the longer you have been surrounded by green space from birth and up to the age of 10. Green space throughout childhood is therefore extremely important," Kristine Engemann explains.

Green and healthy cities

As the researchers adjusted for other known risk factors of developing a mental disorder, they see their findings as a robust indication of a close relationship between green space, urban life, and mental disorders.

Kristine Engemann says: "There is increasing evidence that the natural environment plays a larger role for mental health than previously thought. Our study is important in giving us a better understanding of its importance across the broader population."

This knowledge has important implications for sustainable urban planning. Not least because a larger and larger proportion of the world's population lives in cities.

"The coupling between mental health and access to green space in your local area is something that should be considered even more in urban planning to ensure greener and healthier cities and improve mental health of urban residents in the future," adds co-author Professor Jens-Christian Svenning from the Department of Bioscience, Aarhus University.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/02/190226112426.htm