Residential greenery as an overlooked preventive health and sustainability infrastructure

Abstract

Abstract Urban health and sustainability research increasingly demonstrates the benefits of greenness around people’s homes, yet shared green spaces embedded in residential developments remain comparatively overlooked as distinct lived, designed, and managed environments. In this Perspective, we distinguish residential greenness as exposure from residential greenery as place and argue that the latter constitutes an underused layer of preventive health and sustainability infrastructure. Synthesising previously published empirical studies from Berlin with historical and international literature, we show how residential greenery is shaped by path-dependent housing and planning legacies that continue to influence accessibility, use, ecological quality, and opportunities for health and well-being. Resident-centred evidence further reveals functions that spatial measures alone cannot capture, including restoration, social interaction, everyday contact with nature, and the role of these spaces as collective “green living rooms”. Yet their multifunctional value is often only partly reflected in management priorities dominated by maintenance, costs, and technical requirements. We identify this mismatch as a blind spot in urban health and sustainability governance. We argue that addressing it requires complementing measures of green-space quantity with attention to quality, use, and resident experience, while embedding co-creation, biodiversity, environmental justice, and adaptive management into the governance of everyday residential landscapes.