Journal article
Impacts of nature-inclusive urban development on well-being and fairness perceptions
- Abstract:
- Nature-inclusive urban development (NIUD) is central to international frameworks such as the Global Biodiversity Framework, yet its implementation risks fostering social inequity and green gentrification. This study examines these social impacts through a sequential mixed-methods investigation combining semi-structured interviews and a representative survey in Qunli New Town, Harbin, China, a prominent case of NIUD incorporating landscape-level ecological mitigation and compensation. We found that well-being changes among original residents were linked to adaptation to the new context. Compared to non-agriculturalists (e.g., former small-scale industry workers), former agriculturalists reported a sharper happiness decline relative to the pre-urbanisation era (OR=0.15, P<0.001). Among all original residents, those perceiving increases in social (OR=1.30, P=0.0049) and aesthetic (OR=1.53, P<0.001) values of green spaces reported happiness gains. A critical finding was the stark divergence in fairness perceptions: original residents perceived ecological fairness to be substantially lower than newcomers (OR=0.54, P<0.001) but economic fairness higher (OR=1.93, P<0.001). This was shaped by the rural reference points of original residents—both former agriculturalists and non-agriculturalists— which led them to value economic upgrades, while experiencing ecological displacement from the loss of customary practices and access to previously accessible landscapes. To advance equitable NIUD, social impact assessments should explicitly manage the gentrification trade-off between new green infrastructure and the loss of cultural landscapes, promoting justice for different waves of settlement.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 3.3MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1038/s44284-026-00425-z
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer Nature
- Journal:
- Nature Cities More from this journal
- Publication date:
- 2026-04-07
- Acceptance date:
- 2026-03-09
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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2731-9997
- Language:
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English
- Pubs id:
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2390101
- Local pid:
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pubs:2390101
- Deposit date:
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2026-03-17
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Gao et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2026
- Rights statement:
- Copyright © 2026, The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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