A design-support framework to assess urban green spaces for human wellbeing

Abstract

Rapid and high-density urban development has led to limited Urban Green Space (UGS), which is crucial for human wellbeing and sustainable urban development. To avoid compromising human wellbeing while promoting environmental sustainability, we propose a novel research framework that quantifies the importance of each UGS on-site for human wellbeing, to support multi-objective UGS design. This paper presents a framework for spatial parameterised evaluation of human wellbeing based on accessibility and usability. The evaluation considers connectivity and walking distance for accessibility, and space enclosure and availability for usability. The proposed thresholds and weights can be adjusted to fit different study contexts and reflect various needs. The use case demonstrated that the framework allows for ranking of UGS sites facilitating integration of human needs and other sustainable environmental needs into a multi-objective UGS design workflow. This approach provides designers with evidence to accurately allocate UGS resources according to human needs on each UGS and space conditions of UGS. It also presents an opportunity to integrate with other quantified analyses for sustainable urban development. The framework provides a useful approach to promoting human wellbeing by identifying the most important UGS for safeguarding human needs.