ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Environmental Health and Exposome
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1620076
This article is part of the Research TopicGreening Urban Spaces and Human Health, Volume IIIView all 17 articles
Urban Green Spaces and Public Health: Legal Challenges and Policy Opportunities in Green City Governance
Provisionally accepted
- 1School of Tourism Management, Jinzhong University, Jinzhou, China
- 2Guangzhou Songtian Polytechnic College, Guangzhou, China
- 3National University of Malaysia, Bangi, Malaysia
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The impact of urban green space reduction on public health is increasingly prominent. In this study, three typical cities, Beijing, Hangzhou and Yinchuan, were selected to analyze the relationship between green space coverage and residents' health through multi-source data such as remote sensing images, health statistics and legal texts, using spatial econometric models and other methods. When the green space coverage rate exceeds 38%, the decline rate of chronic diseases is significantly accelerated by 3.3 times, and the improvement rate of mental health is 9.7%. Among them, Hangzhou's "Park City" policy has achieved the most remarkable results, with an average annual growth rate of 1.8%, much higher than Beijing's 0.6% and Yinchuan's -0.3%. The analysis of the legal text Policy Strength Index (PSI) shows that Hangzhou ranks first with 82 points, significantly higher than Yinchuan's 58 points. The research reveals that there is a nonlinear relationship between the spatial distribution of green space and health benefits, and the effect of policy implementation depends on three factors: legal strength, departmental coordination and public participation. Based on the empirical results, it is suggested to adopt the trinity governance path of "accurate greening-system reconstruction-fair promotion" to promote the transformation and upgrading of urban green governance model.
Keywords: urban green space, Public Health, green governance, Legal challenges, policy optimization
Received: 29 Apr 2025; Accepted: 27 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Guo, Wu and Zuo. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Xiangbin Zuo, National University of Malaysia, Bangi, Malaysia
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