Background:

Exposure to urban green spaces – whether in the form of views of green landscapes [1] or visits to urban parks and gardens – offers health benefits for residents across a range of dimensions, including physical, social, mental and environmental health [2]. Green spaces help combat sedentary lifestyles and loneliness. They provide spaces for rejuvenation and protection from the various social stresses and environmental risks that characterise our contemporary lifestyles. They are one of the key drivers in adapting urban environments to the consequences of climate change, and to the frequency and intensity of heatwaves and heavy rainfall.

The theoretical framework for the health benefits of urban green spaces [3-7] summarises this capacity of green spaces to address the multiple health challenges facing populations through four functions: (1) mitigating exposure to environmental risk factors, (2) developing individual capacities, (3) providing a place for recharging, and (4) preserving and developing biodiversity. These functions are developed to varying degrees depending on the characteristics of the green space, and its health potential varies accordingly. Similarly, at the neighbourhood or city level, the types of green spaces, the density or regularity of their network, and their interconnection determine the health benefits that residents can derive from their presence in their residential or working environment. The integration of health considerations into policies and practices relating to the planning, development and management of urban green spaces therefore appears to be a public health issue that local authorities must take into account.

In order to drive and promote the development of green spaces that promote health, we have taken the initiative to develop a tool for assessing the health potential of green spaces (PSEV) for local authorities. Although numerous resources exist to support local authorities in managing their parks and gardens, to our knowledge, none of these tools adopt a public health perspective or consider the multifunctionality of green spaces. Designed for use at national (French) or European level, this tool is being developed as part of the Greencan research project (2022–2026), funded by the National Cancer Institute and the Joint-Action Prevent Non-Communicable Diseases research-action initiative (2024–2027), supported by the European Commission.

Method:

The first phase of developing the tool for assessing the health potential of green spaces was the result of a collaborative effort between a public health research team and a working group comprising various local stakeholders from the fields of the environment, planning and urban development, as well as officials from the City and Metropolitan Area of Rennes (Brittany, France). The aim was to identify indicators of the health potential of green spaces that would enable the level of development of each of their functions to be estimated. These indicators are based on the design characteristics of green spaces, for example their vegetation components (the presence of deciduous trees, lawns, gardens, etc.) or their various facilities, such as playgrounds, water points and toilets, etc.

The second phase involved identifying available and accessible data to inform the indicators of the health potential of green spaces in each European municipality, regardless of its size. With the support of a geomatics engineer and developer, we then developed a tool (a prototype) that enables both the collection of data necessary for calculating the indicators and estimating the health functions of green spaces, and the mapping of the health potential of a city’s green spaces at the scale of geographical areas of varying sizes.

Results:

The result is the development of a web platform called MyGreenSpace or mygreenspace.net, available in French, English and the languages of the European partner cities. Set up for Rennes (France), Rybnik (Poland), Turin (Italy) and Stockholm (Sweden) as part of the Joint Action PreventNCD project, MyGreenSpace is based on the OpenStreetMap (OSM) geolocation database. This was chosen due to its ability to record a wide range of features of green spaces (pathways, dog parks, etc.) useful for characterising their health potential, according to a common classification across the whole of Europe. For the four cities mentioned, MyGreenSpace extracts green spaces from OSM identified using the tags leisure=park and landuse=recreation_ground, combined with a ‘name’ filter.

For each green space recorded in the MyGreenSpace database, two methods of data collection are used to provide information for the 31 indicators of the green space’s health potential. Depending on the type of indicator – ‘quantitative’ or ‘qualitative’, i.e. relying on measurable or observable data – the data is either extracted directly and automatically from OSM, for the five quantitative indicators for example (leaf density, soil permeability, etc.); or the data comes from the form designed to provide information for the 15 strictly qualitative indicators (vegetation strata, sounds of nature, etc.). The remaining 11 indicators are described as ‘mixed’, in that they can be calculated using OSM data if available, or by completing the form.

A graphical user interface has also been developed using the open-source software GoGoCarto. It enables users to describe the health benefits of each green space recorded in MyGreenSpace, to map the health benefits of green spaces within an urban area, and to contribute to data collection via the form or through OSM, as the OSM and MyGreenSpace databases are connected and synchronised.

Discussion-Conclusion:

The MyGreenSpace prototype is designed for local authorities with the aim of promoting the development of green spaces that promote good health. It will be tested by the local authorities involved in Joint Action PreventNCD by September 2026. In Rennes, for example, staff from the Parks and Biodiversity Department will be responsible for filling in the missing data for green spaces in two neighbourhoods with very contrasting types of green spaces. This test will enable us to assess the choice of OSM as the reference database for MyGreenSpace and the estimation of the health potential of green spaces. We will pay close attention to how the green space categories proposed by OSM can be adapted to the needs of a tool for public health promotion and research. We will observe how municipal departments utilise OSM to complete data relating to their green spaces or make available the data they produce at a local level. We will explore the possibilities of enriching the OSM database with new data derived from qualitative indicators.