Mental Health and Green Space
One of my first classes at UIC, in the Fall of 2019, was titled Healthy Cities. In it, I learned how to make cities more resilient and sustainable by focusing on the criteria of public health. Our semester-long assignment consisted of picking a topic and then exploring it first through a literature review and then assessing its viability as a solution through a logic model. My topic was the relationship between mental health and urban green spaces.
Microsoft Word - Midterm Paper.pdfLiterature Review
For my literature review, I focused on six papers that examined the relationship between mental health and proximity to green spaces. Five of the studies measured large areas of green space with four focusing specifically on urban parks. One study looked at perceptions of greenness rather than a more objective measurement of the surrounding physical space.
The studies were all published after 2000 and were conducted in a variety of countries: two in the United States, one in India, one in Australia, and one in the Netherlands.
The result of this review was that living closer to an urban park has a positive effect on mental health. I came into this review expecting as much, but it is good to have confirmation. This finding later led to my next study on urban parks: Crime and Green Space.
Logic Model
After reviewing our topic, we were then to find a program that aligned with our findings and assess its effectiveness as a solution using a logic model. As I found that green space does have a positive effect on mental health, I looked into how cities were creating more green spaces in their communities. I found the non-profit organization, DePave Oregon, to have an interesting premise.
DePave creates green space by working with communities to tear up paved surfaces and replace them with native vegetation, community gardens, and improvements that mitigate storm water runoff. Working backwards from desired long-term outcomes of improved mental health through more green space in cities, I found that while DePaved is excellent for its intended purpose of reducing storm water pollution, the size of its projects, by themselves, are not enough to significantly contribute towards better mental health through greening a city. However, this paper did not account for DePave's work as part of a larger greening of Portland with other community and government actions.
You can read the full paper below.
I created this map in Photoshop to show where DePave's projects were in relation to approved land use. I wanted to see if they were adding green space near housing or staying in largely commercial areas.
DePaved.pdf