Demand-side effects of urban green spaces: How attractiveness helps overcome subjective barriers to health behaviours

The contribution of Urban Green Spaces (UGSs) to public health is a critical topic. Existing research predominantly examines the relationship between enhanced UGSs characteristics — such as availability, accessibility, and usability — and residents’ health, highlighting how these attributes can mitigate objective barriers to health behaviours in UGSs from a supply-side perspective. However, few studies have explored the demand-side effects of UGSs, particularly in how potential visitors overcome subjective barriers to health behaviours. This study hypothesizes that Perceived UGSs Quality (PUGSQ), including attractive qualities like environmental aesthetics and open space publicness, promotes health behaviours in UGSs (HB_UGS) by enhancing residents’ self-efficacy in overcoming subjective barriers (OBSE). An online cross-sectional study was conducted in China in 2020, employing covariance structure analysis to examine the mediating role of OBSE between PUGSQ and HB_UGS. The findings indicate that augmenting PUGSQ bolsters potential visitors’ belief in their ability to overcome subjective barriers to visiting UGSs or participating in activities therein, thereby promoting sustained and regular health behaviours. The mediation model is applicable across varying activity intensities and whether activities are undertaken alone or in groups. OBSE demonstrates a partial mediating effect in the low-activity-intensity group, and full mediating effects in the medium-high-activity-intensity group, the lone activity group and the collective activity group. These results suggest that, in addition to the well-documented passive role of UGSs in health promotion from a supply-side perspective — which predominantly engages visitors’ willpower resources — UGSs can also assume a more active role from a demand-side perspective. This active role involves mobilizing visitors’ desire resources and potentially lessening the strain on their willpower resources, thus offering a more nuanced understanding of UGS’s influence on health behaviours. The position of UGSs in health promotion thus rises from ‘just nice to have’ to ‘essential to have’.