Moderation effect of visible urban greenery on the association between neighbourhood deprivation and subjective well-being: Evidence from Hong Kong

The well-being benefit of urban greenery has been extensively documented broadly, though less is known about its moderation effect on the relationship between neighbourhood deprivation and subjective well-being. Some scholars also argued that the inconclusive associations between urban greenery and subjective well-being might be partially attributed to the various measuring methods of greenery and the difficulty to measure visible greenery objectively. In this study, we applied three approaches to objectively measure different aspects of urban greenery, including overall greenery by Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), visible greenery by Google Street View (GSV) images, and park proximity by geospatial data. We captured two dimensions of neighbourhood deprivation: socio-economic disadvantage and social fragmentation. Using data from the first wave (2015) of the Hong Kong Panel Survey for Poverty Alleviation (N = 1752), the association between urban greenery, neighbourhood deprivation, and subjective well-being was investigated with multilevel linear regression models, while controlling other covariates. We found that subjective well-being level was negatively associated with social fragmentation but no socio-economic disadvantages, while positively associated with overall greenery and visible greenery. Additional moderation effect analysis reveals that the negative linkage between social fragmentation and subjective well-being was significantly mitigated by visible greenery. These findings demonstrated the importance of visible greenery in enhancing subjective well-being, especially for residents in deprived neighbourhoods, and offered new insights to support urban planning and public health strategies to create a healthy living environment.