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Climate change is occurring around us and impacting on our daily lives, meaning that we have to deal with our cities in a different way. There is also increasing awareness of the need for daily contact with green spaces and the natural environment in order to live a happy, productive and meaningful life.

This reflective essay tells the narrative of how urbanisation has been disconnecting humans from nature. Non-sustainable, non-resilient patterns of urbanisation, along with the neglect of inner-city areas, have resulted in fragmentation and urban decline, led to a loss of biodiversity, and caused the deterioration of ecosystems and their services. Urban regeneration projects allow us to “repair” and restore some of this damage whilst enhancing urban resilience. Connecting existing and enhanced ecosystems, and re-establishing ecosystems both within cities and at the peri-urban fringe is vital for strengthening ecosystem resilience and building adaptive capacity for coping with the effects of climate change.

Cities worldwide need to look for suitable solutions to increase the resilience of their urban spaces in the face of climate change. This essay explores how this can be achieved through the integration of nature-based solutions, the re-greening of neighbourhoods and by correctly attributing value to natural capital. Transforming existing cities and neighbourhoods in this way will enable ecosystems to contribute their services towards healthier and more liveable cities.

Globally, urban planners and decision makers are pursuing place-based initiatives to develop and enhance urban infrastructure to optimise city performance, competitiveness and sustainability credentials. New discourses associated with big data, Building Information Modelling, SMART cities, green and biophilic thinking inform research, policy and practice agendas to varying extents. However, these discourses remain relatively isolated as much city planning is still pursued within traditional sectoral silos hindering integration. This research explores new conceptual ground at the Smart – Natural City interface within a safe interdisciplinary opportunity space. Using the city of Birmingham UK as a case study, a methodology was developed championing co-design, integration and social learning to develop a conceptual framework to navigate the challenges and opportunities at the Smart-Natural city interface. An innovation workshop and supplementary interviews drew upon the insights and experiences of 25 experts leading to the identification of five key spaces for the conceptualisation and delivery at the Smart-Natural city interface. At the core is the space for connectivity; surrounded by spaces for visioning, place-making, citizen-led participatorylearning and monitoring.The framework provides a starting point for improved discussions, understandings and negotiations to cover all components of this particular interface. Our results show the importance of using all spaces within shared narratives; moving towards ‘silver-green’ and living infrastructure and developing data in response to identified priorities. Whilst the need for vision has dominated traditional urban planning discourses we have identified the need for improved connectivity as a prerequisite. The use of all 5 characteristics collectively takes forward the literature on socio-ecological-technological relationships and heralds significant potential to inform and improve city governance frameworks, including the benefits of a transferable deliberative and co-design method that generates ownership with a real stake in the outcomes.

There is a mental health crisis, particularly among young people. Despite many young people living in urban settings, reviews about the association between exposure to green or natural environments and mental health tend to focus on either children or adults. The aim of this review is to examine the scope of the global literature for this age group, to inform a systematic review on the role of exposure to green space in preventing anxiety and depression amongst young people aged 14–24 years.

Seven databases were searched for quantitative and qualitative sources published from January 2000 to June 2020. This identified 201 sources and their characteristics are described here. Gaps in the literature are also highlighted.

The number of relevant studies published per year has increased over time. Most studies are set in North America (28%) or Europe (39%). The most common study designs were observational (34%) or experimental (28%). A wide range of exposures and interventions are described.

This review included literature from predominantly high-income countries and has shown the under-representation of low-middle income countries and lack of ethnic diversity in study populations. It has also highlighted the lack of clinical measures of anxiety and depression as outcomes.

This inter-disciplinary review has contributed to the field by describing the geographic distribution of the literature and the broad range of exposures to green spaces being reported. Unlike previous scoping reviews, this review focused specifically on young people and on measures of anxiety and depression and their pre-cursers.

Urban landscapes play a significant role in supporting municipal, ecological and social systems. Besides, valuable environmental services and urban green spaces provide social and psychological services, very important for the liveability of modern cities and the well-being of urban residents. It is clear that the area of green space in a city, the method of designing urban landscape and access to urban green space potentially affect the health, happiness, comfort, safety and security of urban dwellers. Urban landscape plays a significant role in providing habitats for wildlife, and an important vegetation type in doing this is species-rich herbaceous vegetation that provides pollen and nectar plus physical habitat for native fauna. Any factor that makes an impression on the urban landscape (such as climate change) will affect people’s lives directly or indirectly. There is a universal consensus that the temperature has increased in most of the world over the past century the investigation of climate change impacts on the urban landscape is the purpose of this study.

Understanding the process of climate change adaptation is necessary to design plant communities for use in public landscapes. Increased CO₂ and air temperature in conjunction with the changing rainfall conditions, as the three important factors of climate change, potentially alter almost all world ecosystems. Climate change provides new opportunities, and in some cases, an obligate need to use non-native plant species in conjunction with native plant species, not only to reduce the side effects of climate change but also to increase the species diversity and aesthetic value in meadow-like naturalistic planting design.

The authors confirm that this work is original and has not been published elsewhere. In this paper, the authors report on the effects of climate change on urban landscape and suggest different kind of solutions to reduce the effects. The paper should be of interest to readers in the areas of landscape architecture, landscape ecologist, landscape planner, landscape managers and environmental designer.

The purpose of the article is to present some preliminary findings and discussions points from a symposium on Public Outdoor Spaces and COVID-19 organised in Wageningen, The Netherlands, in June 2021.

The article argues for a salutogenic perspective on infrastructure planning and design, dealing with the interplay between the ideas and practices of infrastructure planning and design and the outcomes of those ideas and practices for health.

Within that perspective, the coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis is seen as an opportunity to revive the importance of infrastructure in promoting health and well-being.

The salutogenic approach adds a much-needed new perspective on infrastructure planning and design, and also involves challenges both in research and practice, for the application of holistic principles to the design of new environments.

This study/paper aims to evaluate the floral richness of the central part of Chattogram city, Bangladesh. Chattogram is recognized as the largest port city and the commercial capital of Bangladesh, which confronts faster urbanization and swift infrastructure development. Green spaces in and around Chattogram city are shrinking sharply, which resulted in rapid loss of floral and faunal resources in this area. The present study was carried out from February 2018 to January 2019 to enumerate the vascular plant species of the Sulakbahar ward located in the central part of Chattogram City, Bangladesh.

The study area was categorized into 10 habitats to assess the variation of floral composition. The extensive whole area survey method was applied to record the flora from all sorts of plant habitats of the research area.

The study enumerated 418 vascular plant species under 315 genera and 120 families including natural, planted and cultivated from the study area. The habit form of the recorded plant composition indicated that herbs (35%) constitute the major plant category followed by trees (34%), shrubs (17%), climbers (12%), ferns (1%) and orchids (1%). The study also indicated that exotic species (50.3%) became dominant than native species (49.7%) in Chattogram city because of their scenic beauty, easy propagation and ornamental value to the city planners and inhabitants.

It appeared that floral resources of the Chattogram city area are in great threat due to aggressive and unplanned infrastructure development for housing, offices and institutions by replacing the green spaces. The study recommended that urgent protection measures should be taken to conserve and protect the existing floral resources for the well-being of the urban people.

This purpose of this paper is to understand residents’ choice of preferred measures and their willingness-to-pay (WTP) for the measures to improve the air quality of Hanoi city.

Questionnaire surveys were conducted to collect the opinions of 212 household representatives living in Hanoi City. The survey tools were tested and adjusted through an online survey with 191 responses. Multivariate probit and linear regression models were used to identify determinants of respondents’ choices of measures and their WTP.

Respondents expressed their strong preferences for three measures for air quality improvements, including: (1) increase of green spaces; (2) use of less polluting fuels; (3) expansion of public transportation. The mean WTP for the implementation of those measures was estimated at about 148,000–282,000 Vietnamese dong, equivalent to 0.09–0.16% of household income. The respondents’ choices appear to be consistent with their characteristics and needs, such as financial affordability, time on roads and their perceived impacts of air pollution. The WTP estimates increase with perception of air pollution impacts, time on roads, education and income; but are lower for older people.

Increase of green spaces can be the measure to which policy makers should pay more attention. The match-up of residents needs and well-informed plans will be an important key to success.

This appears to be the first attempt to test the validity of public opinions on choices of measures for improving urban air quality in Vietnam. Our WTP estimates also contribute to the database on the values of improved air quality in the developing world.

The “unplannable” is a welcomed exception to the formal order of urban planning. This opinion article explores some examples of informal urbanism and discusses its ambiguous relationship to public space and unplanned activities in the city. The informal sector offers important lessons about the adaptive use of space and its social role. The article examines the ways specific groups appropriate informal spaces and how this can add to a city’s entrepreneurship and success. The characteristics of informal, interstitial spaces within the contemporary city, and the numerous creative ways in which these temporarily used spaces are appropriated, challenge the prevalent critical discourse about our understanding of authorised public space, formal place-making and social order within the city in relation to these informal spaces.

The text discusses various cases from Chile, the US and China that illustrate the dilemma of the relationship between informality and public/private space today. One could say that informality is a deregulated self-help system that redefines relationships with the formal. Temporary or permanent spatial appropriation has behavioural, economic and cultural dimensions, and forms of the informalare not always immediately obvious: they are not mentioned in building codes and can often be subversive or unexpected, emerging in the grey area between legal and illegal activities.

Zoos are important urban tourism attractions. The challenge for zoos is finding a balance between attracting visitors and enhancing education and conservation management. This research contributes to a greater understanding of the conservation intentions of zoo visitors and how zoos can emphasise conservation management principles sustainably. This study aims to identify the variables that encourage conservation intentions among visitors to a South African zoo.

A destination-based survey was conducted in 2019 at the Johannesburg Zoo, and 445 questionnaires were administered through convenience sampling.

Exploratory factor analyses identified visitors’ conservation awareness because of zoos (pre-conscious, conscious and unconscious), behavioural intentions (advocating and supporting), motives (engagement, edutainment and escapism) and satisfaction (interaction and facility quality, and service and interpretation quality). The behavioural intentions were the dependent variables. Advocating conservation intentions (ACI) is an active role where zoo visitors feel a strong responsibility towards conservation and encourage others to the conservation cause. Supporting conservation intentions (SCI) relates more to loyalty towards visiting the zoo and subsequently supporting conservation. Stepwise linear regression analyses revealed that enhancing ACI relies on SCI, edutainment, conscious awareness, service and interpretation quality and total spending. However, enhancing SCI relies on ACI, interaction and facility quality and the motive, escapism, while engagement revealed a negative relationship.

The results show that zoos can encourage SCI to ACI by using interactive and entertaining interpretations to teach visitors about the zoo’s mandate and the importance of conservation while balancing their need to escape.

In cities with high density, heat is often trapped between buildings which increases the frequency and intensity of heat events. Researchers have focused on developing strategies to mitigate the negative impacts of heat in cities. Adopting green infrastructure and cooling pavements are some of the many ways to promote thermal comfort against heat. The purpose of this study is to improve microclimate conditions and thermal comfort levels in high-density living conditions in Seoul, South Korea.

This study compares six design alternatives of an apartment complex with different paving and planting systems. It also examines the thermal outcome of the alternatives under normal and extreme heat conditions to suggest strategies to secure acceptable thermal comfort levels for the inhabitants. Each alternative is analyzed using ENVI-met, a software program that simulates microclimate conditions and thermal comfort features based on relationships among buildings, vegetation and pavements.

The results indicate that grass paving was more effective than stone paving in lowering air temperature and improving thermal comfort at the near-surface level. Coniferous trees were found to be more effective than broadleaf trees in reducing temperature. Thermal comfort levels were most improved when coniferous trees were planted in paired settings.

Landscape elements show promise for the improvement of thermal conditions because it is much easier to redesign landscape elements, such as paving or planting, than to change fixed urban elements like buildings and roads. The results identified the potential of landscape design for improving microclimate and thermal comfort in urban residential complexes.

The results contribute to the literature by examining the effect of tree species and layout on thermal comfort levels, which has been rarely investigated in previous studies.