Gardener and local activist Martin Goddard tending the allotments at the Children’s Wood and North Kelvin Meadow. © Chris Leslie for Mosaic

If designed well, cities can be good for us. “If you look at urban dwellers epidemiologically,” says Meyer-Lindenberg, “they tend to be richer, better educated, [with] better access to healthcare. And they also tend to be somatically healthier.” They also tend to have a smaller carbon footprint. “You can’t raze cities to the ground and rebuild them,” he says. “You have to find ways to maximise people’s wellbeing.”

Meyer-Lindenberg is currently tracking how different parts of the city affect our mental wellbeing, using a technique called ecological momentary assessment, in which participants repeatedly report on the environment around them in real time. Various studies have suggested that nature – be that a tree or a park – has an important impact on people’s mental health. The app he is currently designing will allow people to plan their routes through the city in order to maximise their exposure to nature.

“The most beneficial nature is the one that looks like the kind of nature that humans would have encountered during their early evolution,” he surmises. Perhaps the manicured parks of the type preferred by urban planners may not actually be that effective at improving our wellbeing.

In 2012, Emily Cutts realised the importance of these kinds of green spaces when the meadow overlooked by her second-floor flat in west Glasgow was threatened with development. Once used as an informal football pitch by locals, the meadow had mostly been frequented by dog walkers and drug addicts since the council, who wanted to sell the land, removed the goalposts. Now it finally looked as if a plan to build 90 deluxe flats might pass.

Cutts decided that the only way to save the meadow was to launch a campaign. Over the next few years, the community organised petitions, events and a three-month vigil in George Square in the city centre. Eventually the Scottish government stepped in. On 21 December 2016, it was determined that the meadow would remain undeveloped. It’s known locally as the Children’s Wood and is managed by a charity.

But why did Cutts and her fellow campaigners fight so passionately for this dingy meadow? Her neighbourhood, about ten minutes north of the Botanic Gardens, already had plenty of green space. Was it simply a case of not wanting development on her doorstep?

When I meet Cutts, in the community garden, she is deep in discussion with the gardener, Christine, about the possibility of using a wormery to transform dog faeces into compost for the trees. There are raised beds for planting, a bathtub with upturned earth for children to dig and an “edible” teepee (pea shoot tendrils will soon be climbing up the twigs). It was planted by a 12-year-old boy who, Cutts tells me, is regularly excluded from school.

Cutts is slight with long blonde hair, a soft Glaswegian accent and an eager countenance. She has an MSc in positive psychology. It was while working as Carol Craig’s researcher, compiling and presenting research on how to improve wellbeing, that she grew to understand the meadow’s potential to make her community healthier and happier.

Today, more than 20 schools and nurseries from the local area use the meadow. During my visit, Kelvinside Academy is having a forestry lesson. Children are playing around the thin birch trees, tying ropes around them, swinging friends vigorously in hammocks that look like laughing body bags, and digging in the earth. They learn to use knives for woodland tasks.

Cutts collaborated with a researcher at the University of Glasgow on a series of tests comparing the attention spans of children who spent their lunchtime in the meadow with those who stayed indoors or played in the school’s concrete playground. The attention of children exposed to nature was “significantly better”. Attention restorative theories argue that nature can have an impact on our attention span by engaging our indirect attention; this allows the type of attention we use for more challenging cognitive tasks, such as mathematical problems, to recuperate. The team also performed a similar experiment looking at children’s creativity in art. “Children who came here used more colours, used more texture, made more depth to their pictures than those who hadn’t played outside,” says Cutts.

Richard Mitchell, a professor in the Social & Public Health Sciences Unit at the University of Glasgow, has also been looking at how exposure to nature affects stress in deprived communities. Despite previous research showing a beneficial impact, his own findings have shown it to be slight. “These are all very deprived communities with a whole range of other problems going on, and the detrimental impact of life in poverty and other stressful situations is not outweighed by access to green space,” he tells me over the phone. “I think what we have to understand is that at a population level it may not have an absolutely spectacular impact straight away, [but] it is important.”

Further study, however, showed that one aspect of exposure to nature “had pretty strong protective effects on mental health in adulthood,” Mitchell says. Those who had been scouts or guides, and had repeated contact with nature over a long period of time “where they’re learning a whole variety of skills including being outdoors and appreciation of nature”, were less vulnerable to mental ill-health.

The Children’s Wood charity runs a regular youth club where they bring young people to help with the gardening. Many of the children come from deprived families: “That’s what always interests us about the space,” says Cutts. “It’s bang right in the centre of inequality – there’s so much poverty and there’s a lot of affluence around. So, we feel it’s sort of a level playing field and everybody is welcome.” Unlike in parks, which can be anonymous, here you have “a committed community who are involved in the space,” she says.

We go up the road together to visit a GP at home who works in Possilpark, one of the poorest districts in the city. She prescribes visits to the Children’s Wood, in addition to other treatments, due to the benefits of “peer support, getting out of your house, talking to others, getting more engaged in your community, watching things grow, nurturing other things, nurturing oneself and self-care”. She says that when her patients talk about the wood, it is one of the few times she sees them smile.

Over 60 per cent of Glasgow’s population lives within 500 metres of a derelict site. A 2013 study found that vacant land and deprivation were linked to poor mental and physical health. It recommended that the city council grant the more than 700 hectares available to highly deprived communities to be used for community good.

“Reclaiming the land for community is definitely the way forward,” Cutts says, as we both look over the meadow in the drizzling rain. “You can tell there’s a need but it’s not happening all over and it could be.”