Impacts of Urban Green Landscapes on Citizens’ Mental Health & Well-Being

Abstract

The Global Platform for Sustainable Cities (GPSC) Online Series focuses on how cities can leverage the COVID-19 pandemic’s unprecedented disruption to facilitate a green recovery and improve their long-term urban sustainability. Managing multi-dimensional urban health issues is not a new challenge for cities, but the recent COVID-19 pandemic reiterates the criticality of health-focused urban planning and management in making cities livable, sustainable, and competitive. In fact, over the last decades, many institutes and cities have developed guidelines, toolkits, and policies and have launched policy initiatives with a special focus on urban health, along with accumulated results from empirical studies. However, going through an unexpected health crisis across the globe, cities often faced difficulties in adopting and implementing existing guidelines and programs on the ground and lack an operational framework that would help them unlock potential investments in promoting the healthy cities to move forward. The World Bank is currently working on developing an operational framework that facilitates the mainstreaming of health perspectives into urban planning and development process.