Biophilic Design in walkable streets for urban health: a scoping review

Source abstract

Under accelerating urbanisation, urban design is increasingly challenged by environmental degradation, heat stress, and mental health pressures that threaten public wellbeing and urban resilience. Addressing these challenges requires design approaches that reconnect people with nature in everyday environments. Biophilic design offers a viable pathway by integrating nature into the built environment. Although widely applied in architecture, landscape, and green infrastructure, its role in shaping healthier walkable streets remains underexplored. Walkable streets, as everyday public spaces, present unique opportunities to promote health through accessible contact with nature. This scoping review examines how Biophilic Design has been defined and applied in walkable streets, focusing on different intervention types, health-related mechanisms, and outcomes. Based on 30 peer-reviewed English and Chinese studies, this review develops a framework linking biophilic design interventions to mediating mechanisms and health outcomes. The integrative framework represents one of the first cross-cultural syntheses at the street scale, showing that English-language studies tend to emphasise ecological restoration and climate adaptation, whereas Chinese-language studies focus more on social cohesion and cultural integration. The findings provide an evidence base for informing context-sensitive urban design and policy strategies to support healthier streets.