Abstract
<title>Abstract</title> <p>Planning for urban nature is still judged mainly by how much green space a place contains rather than by how it is arranged and experienced, and that arrangement is rarely separated from the socioeconomic conditions it is bound up with. This study introduces perceivable landscape connectivity (PLC), a spatially explicit, human-centered measure of landscape configuration, and asks where its relationship with health is independent of income and where it is shared with it. Land cover was classified into grey, green, and blue, and its configuration quantified with aggregation, contiguity, and grey-to-nature contact metrics over walking-scale moving windows, then population-weighted to districts. In a district-year panel of seven Korean metropolitan cities (2019–2024), we entered each metric singly, reporting associations with and without income and testing whether they recur across cities. Configuration related to health in a coherent direction: more tightly aggregated and contiguous built-up land was associated with worse cardiometabolic outcomes and lower life satisfaction, and greater grey–green contact with lower obesity and higher satisfaction. Most associations were shared with income; grey–green contact, the most central and beneficial facet, was the clearest case, its health signal almost entirely carried by income. A smaller set held independent of income, linking built-fabric contiguity and water aggregation to everyday walking and concentrated among older adults. Only grey aggregation and diabetes recurred across all seven cities. Rather than adjusting income away, the study maps where human-centered configuration is inseparable from socioeconomic advantage and where it stands apart, with implications for equitable, context-sensitive planning.</p>