13 MAY 2026 (WED) 15:35 - 16:05

Rethinking the Biophilic City: A Relational-Experiential Framework for Urban Transformation

Miss WANG Panxi  

( Supervisor: Prof Wendy Y. Chen )

Abstract:

Urban biodiversity, as urban residents’ primary contact with nature, provides important health and wellbeing benefits. Yet biodiversity loss and species extinction are intensifying globally, with biosphere integrity identified as one of the first four planetary boundaries to have been transgressed. Cities, long understood as drivers of this crisis, are increasingly recognised as its most consequential agents of resolution, particularly as nearly two-thirds of the global population is projected to reside in cities by 2050. Among the urban transformation paradigms that have emerged in response, such as the green city, the park city, and the biodiverse city, the biophilic city is distinctive in integrating nature into urban design and the planning and management of urban biodiversity, while emphasising interactive relationships between urban residents and the natural environment. Yet although the biophilia hypothesis, the theoretical foundation of biophilic cities, holds that humans are innately drawn to nature, intensifying urbanisation continuously erodes this affinity and is associated with the extinction of experience, leaving everyday relationships between urban residents and urban biodiversity increasingly fragile, especially in high-density cities. This calls for a dedicated framework that examines how urban residents’ relational and experiential connections with urban biodiversity are formed, differentiated, and translated into wellbeing and conservation attitudes within the biophilic city paradigm.

This study identifies four interrelated limitations in current biophilic city scholarship. First, research has been largely oriented towards the ecological provision of urban nature and towards aggregate associations between green exposure and wellbeing, while the everyday processes through which residents encounter, perceive, and form bonds with urban biodiversity remain under-examined. Second, urban biodiversity is frequently treated as an aggregate or abstract whole, while residents’ differentiated dispositions towards specific urban species, ranging from charismatic to common to contested taxa, together with the socio-cultural and biographical sources of these dispositions, have received limited attention. Third, although scholarship has tended to frame human-nature connections as a broadly shared attribute grounded in the biophilia hypothesis, their reconfiguration as situated everyday processes under rapid urbanisation, and their heterogeneity among residents of the same city, remain insufficiently explored. Fourth, methodologically, the complementary strengths of qualitative and quantitative approaches have not yet been fully integrated, and current scholarship remains limited in its capacity to simultaneously trace the situated processes shaping residents’ perceptions and support systematic cross-neighbourhood comparison. Collectively, these limitations leave the biophilic city paradigm under-explored in the very high-density urban contexts where it is most needed.

Grounded in environmental psychology and drawing on the relational values perspective, this study proposes the Relational-Experiential Framework, which conceptualises the biophilic city through two interlocking dimensions of residents’ connections with urban biodiversity: the relational and the experiential. The relational dimension encompasses residents’ attitudes 5 towards specific urban species, the socio-cultural and biographical roots of these attitudes, broader connectedness to nature, ecological worldviews, and social capital formed around urban nature. The experiential dimension encompasses residents’ everyday encounters with urban biodiversity, perceptions of these encounters, psychological responses such as vitality and restorativeness, and species-specific preferences. Together, the two dimensions explain how residents’ connections with urban biodiversity are formed, differentiated, and translated into wellbeing and conservation attitudes.

The framework is empirically examined in Guangzhou, a high-density megacity in southern China characterised by rapid urbanisation, pronounced socio-spatial heterogeneity, and rich subtropical biodiversity. First, a city-wide structured questionnaire survey measures the relational and experiential dimensions of residents’ connections with urban biodiversity. The survey data are analysed through covariance-based structural equation modelling (CB-SEM), which identifies the pathways linking these two dimensions to residents’ wellbeing and conservation attitudes, and through fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), which identifies the configurational conditions shaping these pathways across neighbourhoods. Second, semi-structured interviews with residents across contrasting neighbourhoods are analysed through thematic analysis and cross-community comparison to trace the situated meanings, biographical logics, and lived trajectories through which residents’ connections with urban biodiversity are formed and reshaped.

The study pursues four objectives: (1) to construct the Relational-Experiential Framework as a dedicated analytical lens for studying human-biodiversity relations in urban contexts; (2) at the relational level, to examine how species-specific attitudes, ecological worldviews, and social capital around urban nature jointly shape residents’ conservation attitudes, and how these patterns are differentiated across Guangzhou’s neighbourhoods; (3) at the experiential level, to examine how everyday encounters with and perceptions of urban biodiversity shape residents’ psychological responses and species-specific preferences, and to specify the mediating pathways through which urban biodiversity contributes to residents’ wellbeing within the biophilic city; and (4) to advance biophilic city scholarship by demonstrating that relational-experiential connections offer a productive foundation for repositioning the biophilic city as a transformative paradigm for high-density cities confronting severe biodiversity loss and species extinction.