The associations between urban green spaces and self-reported health for university students in Singapore and Turin

Numerous studies have found that green spaces can promote human health. However, most of the studies only investigate the relationship between green space and health in one single city. Therefore, whether the relationship between green space and health differs among cities with distinct differences in social-cultural and climatic context or there are universal patterns regarding such relationship is still remain unanswered. To investigate this question, this study aims to compare the associations between green space quantity and self-reported health for university students in Singapore and Turin, two high density cities with different social-cultural and climatic context. Students from National University of Singapore (NUS) and Politecnico di Torino (POLITO) were involved in an online survey to measure their self-reported health, use of green spaces and confounding factors. Through collecting the geographic location of student’s residence from online survey, the quantity of green spaces within 400 m-radius buffer surrounding the residence was calculated for each respondent. Through statistical analysis, the associations between green space quantity and self-reported health were revealed in both cities. The results from this work enhanced the knowledge regarding the dependence of green space-health relationship on social-cultural context.