Abstract: The current studies on the relationship between urban green space and residents’ health largely focus on the objective health care function of the green space and how it meets users’ needs, but the complete mechanism of urban green space in health promotion still needs to be further explained. This research introduces the perspective of health behavior theory and adopts the framework of “presence” and “absence” to analyze the relationship between urban green space and health based on authoritative literature reviews, which establishes a new interpretation framework for the health promotion mechanism of urban green space. Three pairs of motivation-barrier relationships in the process of health behavior in urban green space are obtained: “biophilia and original barrier”, “activity needs and objective barrier”, and “control belief and subjective barrier”. The roles of urban green space are respectively existence, support and attraction. This research further rearranges the distribution structure of the existing issues on the relationship between urban green space and health according to the framework, and argues that in addition to the popular issues under the topic of green space and health, such as biophilia, accessibility and functionality, it is also worth exploring the relationship between urban green space quality and the ability of potential users to overcome subjective barriers.