Towards Healthier Cities: Urban Green Spaces (UGS) in the Neighbourhood Benfica, Lisbon

The World Health Organisation and the European Healthy Cities Network recommend that urban planning and designing focus on the communities and increase their well-being. In recent years, urban planning and design have provided urban rehabilitation in once peripheral or cross-border areas. It has offered the opportunity to redesign the public realm towards sustainable and healthier Cities. Benfica is a Lisbon district that evolved from an overlap of a rural town and a suburbanization process led by a railway line. It has its own character, great urban livelihood, and a high centrality potential. A whole span of green spaces can be found in the Benfica district found: formerly rural areas like Granja Estate, urban pocket spaces, the Monsanto Forest Park, and the rehabilitation of heritage that allowed the gardens of the Baldaya Palace to be open to the public. The study explores the role and impact of green spaces towards healthier cities through a mixed methodology, applied to the Lisbon Green Capital 2020 and Benfica, which is seen as a representative neighbourhood (1) Review of literature, policies, urban planning, (2) observation methods, mapping, and spatial analyses of green space types and their correlation with different indicators; and, possibly (3) interviews. References Madanipour, Ali. 2018. 'Temporary Use of Space: Urban Processes between Flexibility, Opportunity and Precarity'. Urban Studies 55 (5): 1093–11 Batty, M. (2021) ‘Science and design in the age of COVID-19’, Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 48(1), pp. 3–8. doi: 10.1177/2399808321989131. Louro, A., Marques da Costa, N. and Marques da Costa, E. (2021) ‘From Livable Communities to Livable Metropolis: Challenges for Urban Mobility in Lisbon Metropolitan Area (Portugal)’, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18(7), p. 3525. doi: 10.3390/ijerph18073525. Pineo, H. (2020) ‘Towards healthy urbanism: inclusive, equitable and sustainable (THRIVES) – an urban design and planning framework from theory to praxis’, Cities & Health, 0(0), pp. 1–19. doi: 10.1080/23748834.2020.1769527. Vikas Mehta, Danilo Palazzo, ed. 2020. Companion to Public Space. 1st ed. Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.