Make My City Thrive – an impact assessment framework for measuring the wellbeing benefits of urban greening

The role of green infrastructure in towns and cities is growing rapidly, with benefits ranging from climate mitigation, flood prevention, air quality and noise reduction, to improving biodiversity, economic value, human health and wellbeing. Charities, non-governmental organisations, landscape architects and developers are increasingly implementing these initiatives and typically monitor impacts in terms of objective measures, such as environmental quality, number of people engaged, and money spent.

But what do we understand about the effect of in-situ urban green interventions on more subjective outcomes, such as psychological wellbeing? How could these subjective aspects of social and environmental impact be monitored, evaluated and optimised, helping to build a wealth of evidence on the in-situ benefits of designs?

Make My City Thrive is a mixed-mode impact assessment framework designed to capture and communicate the effectiveness of urban landscape designs and how they affect our access to nature, environmental quality and wellbeing. It comprises seven themes: landscape; habitat; environmental quality; access to nature; use and behaviour; inclusivity; and health and wellbeing, each with sub-metrics and methodologies that use secondary data and GIS analysis, observational and environmental surveys, and primary psychological surveys and innovative micro-journaling methods.

The framework is being developed by Tranquil City, in partnership with the University of Surrey’s Environmental Psychology Research Group, and is built to provide a consistent yet flexible approach to impact assessment that considers equity and engagement of the community, and enables its use by both resource-limited community garden groups and large-scale housing developers.

In this talk, the framework will be outlined, showcasing examples of the tools, methods and outputs developed with several non-academic partners within urban case studies. Reflections will cover how developing the framework in a live environment, in two locations in Inner and Central London, has allowed the team to gain insight into what is needed to effectively engage, involve and communicate with stakeholders and the local community in order to showcase the wellbeing impact of their interventions to funders.

Learning Objectives

• Practitioner assessment of the impacts of urban green infrastructure interventions on subjective wellbeing 
• Mixed-mode data gathering and analysis methods to support inclusive, holistic assessment approaches
• To enable in-situ assessment of urban greening interventions to support design and planning