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Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Science

ISSN Online: 2576-0548 ISSN Print: 2576-0556 CODEN: JHASAY
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ArticleOpen Access http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/jhass.2025.09.012

From the Second Body to the Shared City: Public Art as Urban Therapeutics Through Restorative and Biophilic Design

Junzhu Nie, Dong Ye*

School of Innovation and Creation Design, Shenzhen Polytechnic University, Shenzhen 518055, Guangdong, China.

*Corresponding author: Dong Ye

General Project of the 2023 Annual Scheme for Shenzhen’s Education Science “14th Five-Year” Plan (yb23018).
Published: October 16, 2025

Abstract

Public art is increasingly mobilised across Chinese cities to address everyday mental strain, yet the mechanisms linking micro-scale artworks to measurable well-being remain under-specified and under-evaluated. This article proposes Daisy Hildyard’s “Second Body” as a conceptual anchor to reframe public art as an interface between the physiological body and wider socio-ecological relations. We situate the argument within the Healthy China agenda, which emphasises mental-health promotion, community settings, and everyday environments, and within the growing domestic discussion of “social prescribing”-style, community-linked arts and health pathways. Synthesising environmental psychology—Attention Restoration Theory and Stress Recovery Theory—with biophilic design and place-attachment research, we derive field-ready design principles and pair them with validated, brief measures suitable for public space: SWEMWBS/WEMWBS, I-PANAS-SF, and short PRS/Rest@U variants. We then propose a mixed-methods protocol tuned to open-air Chinese sites (libraries, clinic forecourts, pocket streets), integrating emotion-mapping and behavioural observation. By linking the Second Body to operational metrics and replicable design choices, the paper offers an actionable pathway for studying—and scaling—the civic and therapeutic value of public art in everyday urban China.

Keyword

Public art; Second Body; Healthy China; Biophilic design; Restorative environments; place attachment; Urban well-being; Measurement

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Copyright

© 2025 by the author(s).
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) license, which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not modified or adapted.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

How to cite this paper

From the Second Body to the Shared City: Public Art as Urban Therapeutics Through Restorative and Biophilic Design

How to cite this paper: Junzhu Nie, Dong Ye. (2025) From the Second Body to the Shared City: Public Art as Urban Therapeutics Through Restorative and Biophilic Design. Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Science9(9), 1763-1767.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/jhass.2025.09.012