Helbich, M., Browning, M.H.E.M., Voets, D. and Dadvand, P. (2025) 'Adherence to the 3+30+300 urban green space rule and mental health, physical activity, and overweight: A population-based study in the Netherlands', Environment International, 202, 109643. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envint.2025.109643.

A memorable planning rule acquires authority more quickly than the outcomes it is intended to secure. Using detailed urban-tree and green-space indicators linked to 2022 survey responses from 180,949 Dutch adults, Helbich and colleagues test the combined 3+30+300 rule against multiple health and behavioural measures through covariate-adjusted mixed-effects logistic regression. Only 16.4 per cent of respondents meet the composite rule. Adherence is associated with greater physical activity and lower likelihood of overweight, but not with the measured mental-health or other health outcomes. The negative findings are not a weakness to erase: they separate environmental provision from assumed psychological effects. Moreover, indicators assigned to residential addresses cannot account for all exposures accumulated in everyday movement. The work contributes a demanding principle of inference: preserve the distinction between a spatial planning threshold, the behaviour potentially associated with it and the health outcome actually observed. A neighbourhood archive should document those links without declaring them causal in advance.

Sfîcă, L., Crețu, C.-Ș., Ichim, P., Hrițac, R. and Breabăn, I.-G. (2023) 'Surface urban heat island of Iași city (Romania) and its differences from in situ screen-level air temperature measurements', Sustainable Cities and Society, 94, 104568. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2023.104568.

The thermal city is not a single temperature field. Sfîcă and colleagues align MODIS land-surface temperature with screen-level air observations in Iași, making disagreement between two legitimate measurements the object of investigation rather than an error to suppress. Their analysis relates the geometry and intensity of the surface urban heat island to season, atmospheric circulation and impervious land cover. In spring and summer daylight conditions, surface and two-metre air temperatures can diverge by approximately 5–7°C; nighttime relationships differ. The study therefore interrupts a common slide from thermal imagery to claims about human exposure. Satellite surfaces, measured air and felt heat occupy different observational layers, each with its own spatial and temporal assumptions. The transferable operation is paired measurement: keep data streams distinct, register where they converge or diverge, and preserve the circumstances of observation. For walking-based comparative fieldwork, the mismatch is a research finding in its own right, especially across heterogeneous urban materials, slopes, shade structures and seasons.