Seite - 438 - in Biodiversity and Health in the Face of Climate Change

438 spaces must be adapted to the users’ demands and stakeholder participation should play an important role in the planning processes (as, of course, should generally be the case, also regarding other planning issues besides health). As the investigation of the ten English planning documents revealed, even explicit references to health issues are generally quite vague, e.g. ‘GI promotes healthier lifestyles’. How this happens is often not explained, nor the means to plan green space to achieve this goal. To strengthen such kinds of statements it would be helpful to refer to scientific studies which give evidence of positive effects of urban green space on human health, and the likely magnitude of that effect. Examples of such studies include: Abraham et  al. (2007), Bedimo-Rung et  al. (2005), Bell et  al. (2008), Fuller et  al. (2007), Francis et  al. (2012), Grahn and Stigsdotter (2010), Kaczynski et  al. (2008), Lee and Maheswaran (2011), Mitchell and Popham (2007), Newton (2007), Pretty et  al. (2010), Roe et  al. (2013, 2016), Stigsdotter et  al. (2010), Ward Thompson et  al. (2012, 2016) and the Germany TEEB-study on urban areas (Naturkapital Deutschland  – TEEB-DE 2016b) which gives an overview of the German context. A recent review of evidence on the many ways in which urban green space is linked to health can be seen in WHO 2016 and evidence on environ- mental interventions in green space to enhance health is summarised in Hunter et  al. Chap. 17, this volume, and WHO (2017b). These and other similar publications can be helpful for landscape planners (in private offices as well as in public administra- tion) as they offer sound evidence when it comes to decisions on conflicts or com- petition between different land uses, e.g. traffic, settlement and green space. 19.5 Health-Promoting Features of  Green Spaces The potential of green spaces to benefit human health, and their actual effects on health, depend on a variety of features and elements. These features and elements are presented in this section. For landscape planners, especially if pursuing the third option described in the last section, such features must be taken into consideration when assessing the health relevance of existing green spaces as well as designing new and redesigning existing ones. Unfortunately, to date it has not proved possible to attribute distinct health potentials and effects to certain, more generally defined, green space types, such as park, pocket-park, cemetery, garden, forest and so on, because in practice, these types are too heterogeneous in terms of size, location, vegetation, design, surrounding (infra-)structures or potential user groups, to allow for a similarly simplistic categorization of effect (Rittel et  al. 2016, p.  50). Consequently, the consideration of each individual green space is required. However, it is not only the individual green space which should be considered, but also the entire open space system, or green infrastructure in a given area (municipality, city), as one green space rarely includes all desirable features and elements, but the entire system could or should do so. Sugiyama et  al. (2010) make a good case for this in relation to physical activity, where size of park and the opportunities it offers for S. Heiland et al.