The benefits of a green city

Footways is a network of quiet and enjoyable routes for walking in London, here Emma Griffin, co-founder of Footways discusses the benefits of having access to green spaces close to where we live

We’ve all felt it and the evidence proves it: spending time in nature makes you happier and smarter, prevents disease and helps you care for the environment. The good news is that people in the UK are spending more time outside and making increasing use of green spaces near homes. During the Covid-19 Lockdowns, we soon learnt there was no need to drive to the countryside to connect with nature when there were so many beautiful spaces on the doorstep. The bad news is that engagement with nature is unequal, with low income, ethnic minority and some age groups significantly less likely to enjoy it.
    
Breaking down these barriers requires material changes – improvements in accessibility, better planning, and a huge reallocation of road space for planting. But we also need to change minds and challenge assumptions about how we use green spaces. To reach a city’s diverse communities, this requires a huge range of tools, technologies, innovations and wayfinding solutions. There’s no “one size fits all”; we just need an open mind.

The evidence  
There are countless studies on the importance of green space for our mental and physical health. Urban woodlands for example have been associated with positive impacts on cardiovascular function, weight, respiratory health, the immune system, depression, cognition and attention and social cohesion. The University of Essex’s Green Exercise Research Groups’ extensive work has shown that “individuals have less mental distress, less anxiety and depression, greater wellbeing and healthier cortisol profiles when living in urban areas with more green space.”
    
More people are making the most of these benefits. According to Nature England’s Monitor of Engagement of the Natural Environment, a massive UK survey conducted between 2009 and 2019, the annual total of visits to the natural environment increased from an estimated 2.9 billion visits in 2009/10 to almost 4 billion in 2019.
    
By far most of these visits are close to people’s homes, taken on foot to parks, woodlands and open spaces in towns and cities.  Between 2009 and 2019, the average distance travelled to green spaces decreased from 6.8 miles to 4.9 miles.
    
But the MENE study also revealed stark inequalities in how different age, ethnic and socio-economic groups use and experience the natural environment. Sixty per cent of white adults and children walk through green spaces on their way to other places, compared to 30 per cent of Black participants and 44 per cent Asian. There were also clear differences in provision of green spaces between socioeconomic groups. The data showed that the most affluent 20 per cent of wards in England have five times more parks and general green spaces than the most deprived 10 per cent.

London Nature Trails  
We had this data in mind when developing the London Nature Trails with the Mayor of London this summer. The Mayor’s intention was to connect Londoners to nature on their doorstep and address the inequalities in access to green space across the city.
    
We developed four walking routes which connect natural spaces in areas lacking large parks and open spaces, using green “corridors”, such as waterways, small parks, and tree-lined streets. The routes are Burnt Oak to Wembley in north London, Bermondsey to Brockley in the south, Wanstead to Royal Docks in the east and Swiss Cottage to King’s Cross centrally.
    
The routes pass through a huge variety of habitats and some spectacular and hidden nature sites including Stave Hill Ecological Park in Southwark; Welsh Harp Open Space in Brent; Bow Creek Ecology Park in Newham; and Camley Street Natural Park in Camden.
    
We published the trails as four pocket-sized printed maps on the August Bank Holiday and distributed maps for free from local libraries, stations and community spaces. A series of free nature activities also took place during the launch weekend to encourage people to enjoy the routes and local green spaces. Walkers can follow the routes on their phones via the Footways website and the free Go Jauntly walking app. More information about this project can be found at footways.london/london-nature-trails.

More projects
Projects like the London Nature Trails will be even more important when green or active travel social prescribing become the norm. The government recently announced a new trial for GP practices in England to offer social prescriptions for walking, wheeling and cycling to improve mental and physical health. This is a fantastic example of transport, active travel and health officials working together to improve health and tackle health disparities.
    
Thankfully, there are a growing number of tools and activities for GPs to choose from when prescribing active travel in green spaces.
    
Earlier this year, we published Central London Footways, a printed and digital map of walking that links London’s mainline stations and key destinations with green, quiet and interesting streets. The aim of this project is to improve the quality and health impact of A-to-B journeys in the capital. We think the easiest way to stay healthy is by embedding activity into daily routines.
    
The Ramblers’ network of volunteers runs thousands of Wellbeing Walks across England, so people can join short group walks near where they live.
    
Walking app, Go Jauntly has a new routing feature that recommends the greenest routes within the user’s vicinity, so they can either plan leafy A-B journeys or create nature-filled circular walks.
    
Since London became the world’s first National Park City in 2019, there are now 150+ volunteer rangers across the capital helping communities connect with nature.
    
Urban Good’s National Park City map was the first to present London as a network of parks, woodlands, playing fields, rivers and lakes, rather than roads and buildings. Like Footways, this is another example of using mapping to change how we think about and use the city.
    
City Girl in Nature produces videos and other works to engage and connect young inner city people with the natural environment.
    
TfL has recently published its Leisure Walking Plan. As part of the new Leisure Walking Plan, TfL has partnered with Go Jauntly to digitise the Walk London network – one of the world’s largest urban walking networks.

Infrastructure
But initiatives such as these are only useful if delivered alongside improved infrastructure to embed green space into every part of the city.
    
We need more trees and in particular a diversity of trees to create urban forests; we need more rain gardens, or sustainable drainage systems (SuDS) which not only reduce risk of floods but allow space for biodiversity and communities; we need to stop paving-over front yards for cars and start filling them with plants; we need more green walls, more green roofs, more guerrilla gardening, more garden ponds, the list goes on.   
    
And then, most critical of all, to ensure access to green spaces is safe and equal, we need to create traffic-free links to green spaces. To achieve this, cities must embrace a city-wide system of road space reallocation through road pricing and low traffic neighbourhoods.
    
This takes time, of course. But in the meantime, there are easy wins such as ‘parklets’, which transform parking spaces into pockets of green. Not only do parklets provide green space, they empower communities, build social alliances and allow people to invest in the streets they live in.
    
The reallocation needn’t stop at a car parking space: whole streets can be transformed into parks. Camden Council has recently transformed Alfred Place Gardens, once a drab road near Tottenham Court Road into a pretty linear park with plants, seating and play spaces.

Not just about green space
But it’s not just green or blue spaces that make us happy and healthy in cities. There are lots of other factors that improve the quality, safety and happiness of an urban environment. When devising the Footways walking network in central London, for example, we considered a street’s architecture, the amount of traffic, the number of places to rest, the number of shops or people. All these factors impact our enjoyment of and connection with a space.
    
Many of these changes, tools and technologies needn’t require massive budgets - just a different way of thinking about what the city is for and how we allocate space.