Special Issue on Quantifying the Impact of Urban Landscapes on Health

Introduction:

Urban landscapes are increasingly recognized as critical infrastructures for promoting public health, environmental resilience, social equity, and sustainable urban development. In the context of rapid urbanization, population aging, climate change, and global public health challenges, green spaces, blue spaces, streetscapes, community open spaces, and everyday urban environments play essential roles in shaping physical activity, mental restoration, social interaction, environmental exposure, and overall well-being. Recent advances in geographic information systems, remote sensing, street-view imagery, wearable devices, mobile sensing, environmental monitoring, artificial intelligence, and spatial statistical methods have created new opportunities to quantify the health impacts of urban landscapes. However, significant gaps remain in developing standardized indicators, identifying causal mechanisms, translating empirical evidence into planning and design strategies, and comparing health-related landscape effects across different regions, cultures, and urbanization contexts.

This Special Issue aims to advance interdisciplinary research on health-oriented urban landscapes and the application and development of urban landscapes-based healing solutions in healthy city initiatives, by integrating evidence-based planning and design, quantitative assessment, cross-regional comparison, and pan-globalization theory, and with a focus on theoretical frameworks, empirical studies, design practices, and policy integration.

Topics covered:

• Quantitative assessment of urban landscape exposure and health outcomes; 
• Health benefits of urban parks, streetscapes, or other public open spaces; 
• Evidence-based planning and design for healthy urban landscapes; 
• Cross-regional, cross-city, and cross-cultural comparisons of landscape-health relationships; 
• Urban landscape accessibility, spatial equity, and health inequalities; 
• Applications of GIS, remote sensing, street-view imagery, wearable devices, and AI in health landscape research; 
• Causal pathways linking landscape characteristics, environmental perception, behavior, and health; 
• Climate adaptation, landscape resilience, and public health; 
• Pan-globalization theory and global-local dynamics in healthy urban landscape planning; 
• Policy, governance, and design strategies for healthy and sustainable cities.

Important deadlines:

Submission deadline: 1 July 2027

Publication date: December 2027

Submission instructions:

Please read the Guide for Authors before submitting. All articles should be submitted online, please select [Health Impacts of Urban Landscapes] on submission.

Guest editors:

• Dr. Bin Jiang, Associate Professor, The University of Hong Kong, China. Email: jiangbin@hku.hk
• Dr. Sining Zhang, Associate Professor, Southwest Jiaotong University, China. Email: zsning@swjtu.edu.cn
• Dr. Shixian Luo, Assistant professor, Southwest Jiaotong University, China. Email: shixianluo@swjtu.edu.cn