Healthy Urban Places Seminar: How do urban green space interventions promote health behaviours?

This episode in the series will be focusing on 'How do urban green space interventions promote health behaviours? Evidence from natural experiments', hosted by guest speaker Jack Benton from The University of Manchester.

Urban green space (UGS) interventions are a promising way of improving population health and wellbeing, through behavioural pathways such as physical activity, social interaction, and engagement with nature. However, robust evaluations of UGS interventions in real-world settings (‘natural experiments’) remain scarce, limiting the evidence available to inform policy and practice. In this talk, Dr Benton will present findings from his natural experiment evaluations in some of Manchester’s most deprived neighbourhoods. He will show how these studies are strengthening the evidence base on UGS and health, while also developing new methods that address methodological weaknesses causing high risk of bias in previous natural experimental studies. Together, this research is helping to advance more rigorous and policy-relevant evaluations of UGS interventions.

Dr Jack Benton is a Research Fellow in the Department of Geography at the University of Manchester, having recently been awarded a prestigious Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship. He is developing new tools, theory, and natural experimental evidence to understand how urban green space interventions can promote health and wellbeing. His research provides practice-based evidence to inform urban policy, planning, and community interventions, with the aim of improving population health and reducing inequalities.

Please find details of future seminars below.

The Healthy Urban Project aims to understand how local urban places impact health and how this understanding can be used to help cities become healthier and happier places to live.

As part of this project, we will be hosting a series of online seminars that will aim to explore a variety of research topics relating to the impact of urban environments on health by inviting guest speakers to share their research.
The 2025 and 2026 seminars will take place online at 11am on the last Wednesday of the chosen month.

The details of all our upcoming seminars, with topics and guest speakers, are detailed below. If you are interested in the other episodes, please use the links below to sign up to the seminars:

Please note you must sign up for each seminar separately.