Abstract
Urban green spaces play a critical role in public health and human wellbeing for urban residents. Due to the uneven spatial distribution of urban green spaces in most of cities, the issue of the disparity between supply and demand has aroused public concern. In a case of Shenzhen, a modified Gaussian-based two-step floating catchment area (2SFCA) method is adopted to evaluate the disparity between park provision and the demanders in terms of accessibility at hierarchical levels under four types of distance (e.g., Euclidean distance, walking distance, bicycling distance, and driving distance), which is well aligned with hierarchical systems in urban green spaces in urban planning practice. By contrast and correlation analysis, among the four types of distance, the statistical correlations are relatively high between Euclidean distance and the other three. Nonetheless, the pattern of spatial accessibility under different type of travel distance is apparently variant. Accessibility calculated by Euclidean distance is overestimated relative to that of the other three, while the pattern of walking distance and bicycling distance is similar to each other. The choice of type of distance is worthy of caution when evaluating spatial accessibility by 2SFCA method. Results show that the accessibility to parks at all hierarchical levels is high particularly, particularly at the natural level. However, the disparity between the supply and demand is significant. The percentage of communities that have high population density but low park accessibility is over 40% (equivalent to approximately 55% of the population). The finding may provide implications on access to urban greens paces for urban planners and authorities to develop effective planning strategies.
Highlights
Urban green spaces, such as parks, forests, greenbelts, and residential greenery, play a critical role in the connection between human beings and the natural environment in urbanized areas, which provide physical, psychological, environmental, economic, and social benefits for city dwellers [1,2,3,4]
(3) With respect to transportation mode, the number of underserved communities, the area of unserved communities and the unserved population are the lowest for Euclidean distance, but the largest for driving distance. This finding indicates that the park accessibility assessed by MG2SFCAwithin a fixed catchment size is easy to overestimate by the metric of Euclidean distance
This study introduced an innovative model, named as modified Gaussian-based 2SFCA
Summary
Urban green spaces, such as parks, forests, greenbelts, and residential greenery, play a critical role in the connection between human beings and the natural environment in urbanized areas, which provide physical, psychological, environmental, economic, and social benefits for city dwellers [1,2,3,4]. Urban green spaces covered with vegetation can contribute to improving air quality [5], alleviating urban heat island effects [6,7], and offsetting carbon emission [8,9]. Especially parks, are ideal places for residents to relax, enjoy leisure activities, perform physical activity, and communicate. A large body of literature explored the associations between green spaces and health (for example, [10,11,12,13]). Public Health 2019, 16, 1038; doi:10.3390/ijerph16061038 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph
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