Productive Rather Than Aesthetic Urban Landscapes Drive Actualized Sustainable Consumption

Xuan Luo , Yi Wu, Junyan Ye, Hang Yin, Yiding Hou, Sanchita Ray, Te Bao, Hong Xu, Liyan Xu, Wei Liu

Global sustainability initiatives prioritize urban greenery to foster resilient cities, yet their efficacy remains under-researched in the Global South. Conventional reliance on self-reported data risks a pervasive “green illusion”— a discrepancy between reported behavior and actual sustainable consumption behavior. To diagnose this anomaly, we synthesize spatial morphology and psychometric surveys across 149 Southeast Asian cities with objective e-commerce transaction logs from a matched 125-city analytical sample. We construct a Desakota index to capture integrated urban–agricultural landscapes typical of emerging economies, alongside a conventional green exposure index. We find that psychological nature connectedness acts primarily as an “internal calibrator,” recalibrating the self-reported bias without closing the actual gap. Furthermore, while mainstream “greening urban space” models show limited association, Desakota morphologies are strongly associated with objective sustainable consumption, independent of psychological mediation. These patterns suggest that rapidly urbanizing regions should elevate productive landscapes as valuable sustainability assets rather than transitional relics.