EDITORIAL WELCOME TO THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HEALTHY SPACE
As the Chief and Executive Editors, Professor Simon Bell and Dr Ziwen Sun would like to welcome you to this new interdisciplinary journal. We are aware that there are many well-established journals which in many ways also cover the theme of healthy space. However, we feel that there are gaps and a need to offer a platform in this area that can bridge theory, research and practice in a way that allows each aspect to inform the others and to integrate them to produce better results. As an open access journal with modest article processing charges, we hope to attract a mix of papers, including conventional research papers, reviews, theoretical explorations, presentations of methodological developments, critical reviews of proposed or completed projects, and short reports publicizing important ongoing projects, new books or policy initiatives. This first issue consists of a series of opinion papers which look back at the development of research into healthy space over the last 20 years with a focus on the European context and also look forward to what different leading experts from a range of countries see as the main priorities for the next ten years.
What do we mean by “healthy space” in this journal? We consider it a broad, inclusive term covering various aspects related to human and planetary health, as well as diverse types of spaces.
We use the World Health Organization (WHO) definition of health as "a state of complete physical, mental, and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity"; this definition emphasizes that health encompasses more than just the absence of illness and includes positive aspects of physical, mental, and social functioning. We are also interested in the ecological health of primarily urban spaces, which we define as the state of ecological systems within urban environments, focusing on their sustainability, resilience, and overall functionality as influenced by urban development and human activities. It involves maintaining biodiversity, green spaces, water quality, air quality, and ecosystem services that support both human wellbeing and environmental health in cities. A healthy urban ecological system can adapt to changes, reduce pollution, and enhance the quality of life for urban residents while preserving ecological integrity.
The term “space” here encompasses both indoor and outdoor spaces. Indoor spaces that affect health and wellbeing include residential, institutional, and commercial environments, such as homes, schools, hospitals, prisons, offices, factories and shopping centres, where people spend a great deal of time and where the environment impacts health in various ways, both positive and negative. Outdoor spaces include green, blue, and grey spaces at all scales, from the vastness of oceans and wild parks to agricultural and rural landscapes, and down to the city scale and smaller spaces within cities, such as parks and gardens. Green spaces are generally those covered in vegetation and include forests, parks, gardens, and green corridors, while blue spaces refer to bodies of water and their terrestrial margins, such as rivers, seas, lakes and canals. Grey spaces include urban streets, squares, and other hard-surfaced and generally non-vegetated spaces. We also wish to focus on the linkages between indoor and outdoor spaces that are often intimately connected.
A healthy space is one that, first, does not pose health risks-such as through pollution, radiation, exposure to pathogens, noise, and negative visual impact-and, second, supports human wellbeing by providing functional, safe, and attractive settings for various activities by diverse groups of people.
The subject of healthy space is multi-dimensional and multi-disciplinary, and we welcome submissions that originate from a range of fields, especially when they are interdisciplinary. These include the health and social sciences, such as public health, environmental psychology, health geography and sociology; the natural sciences such as ecology, horticulture, urban forestry,oceanography and hydrology; the planning and design sciences, such as urban planning, architecture, interior design, and landscape architecture; and the humanities, such as politics, economics, history and the arts. This might seem as if the focus of the journal is very broad compared with others, but this is partly our purpose, since we wish to capture the multidimensionality of the subject and strongly believe that breadth is as important as depth.The following is a selection (by no means exhaustive) of the health-and space-related aspects that are facing societies around the word and that we would like to see covered by the journal. The perspectives we offer below are a personal synthesis based on our experience, our own research, observations of our surroundings, readings of the evidence, and discussions with colleagues, forming a diagnosis of the problems we wish to address. We would like to encourage debates around these different aspects-which cannot be treated in isolation-within the journal.