As the fundamental public resource shared by citizens, urban public space undertakes a series of functions such as serving daily life, enhancing social interaction, stimulating social vitality, and promoting equitable city development. Furthermore, on account of the driving force and the impact of the transformation of urban social structure, urban public space also plays an important role in improving the urban spatial governance system and enhancing the social governance capabilities. Based on the consideration of social attributes, urban public space plays multiple roles such as the material carrier of social form, the public sphere, and the freedom and power dialogue field for citizens. From the perspective of the interaction between material space and social space, the construction of a healthy city needs to continuously strengthen the social attributes of urban public space, promote the two-way positive interaction between spatial structure and social structure, and return spatial power to society, in order to defend urban fairness and justice, and enable urban public space to move from a state of intensified differentiation to a trajectory of benign development towards good governance. Combining the construction of high-quality healthy city and the upgradation of modern urban governance capability, this paper reviews the development of the healthy city concept and the study of public space values, analyses the fundamental properties of public space, as well as the value orientation and governance connotation of urban public space planning, and further discusses the specific response ways of urban public space planning for the development of healthy city from three aspects, including planning value transformation, planning system reformation and planning research expansion. Based on this knowledge, the paper points out that setting up urban public space planning with the connotation of urban governance is not only the requirement of high-quality healthy city construction, but also the approach to promoting the urban modernization governance capability.