Healthy Urban Places Seminar: How do urban green space interventions promote health behaviours?
Jack Benton, University of Manchester
29 October 2025 11:00 - 12:00
PHI UK Healthy Urban Places is building understand of how local urban places impact health and how this knowledge can be used to help cities become healthier and happier places to live. They are 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.
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.
Future seminars
26 Nov 2025. Daniel Black, Bristol Medical School. Overview of the TRUUD programme: Trying to tackle root causes upstream of unhealthy urban development
25 Feb 2026. Dr Matthew Hobbs, Sheffield Hallam University. Talk title TBC
27 May 2026. Richard Self, Welsh Government. Evaluating the 20mph restricted roads policy in Wales
