Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has encouraged a deeper exploration about how people deal with crisis. This paper presents one of the first pre- and during-pandemic assessments of urban green infrastructure (UGI) use across the same individuals with the aim of better understanding how people's use of different types of urban green and blue spaces changed during the pandemic. A baseline Public Participation GIS survey (N= 1,583 respondents) conducted in August 2018 was followed up in May 2020 (N= 418 identical respondents) during the COVID-19 pandemic in Helsinki, Finland. We found that residents were more likely to visit UGI closer to their home during the pandemic compared with before the pandemic. Patterns of use of UGI were associated with the quality of residential green areas, for example, people sought out forests nearby one's domicile and tended to avoid parks and recreation areas in order to escape the pressures of lockdown, socially distance and avoid overcrowding. However, spatial cluster analyses also revealed that the places mapped by intensive users of natural recreational areas and more outdoor oriented users became more dispersed during the pandemic, suggesting their active search for new types of UGI, including use of agricultural land and residential areas with high tree density cover. Our results further highlighted that some types of UGI such as more distant natural and semi-natural areas and blue spaces serve as critical infrastructure both before and during the pandemic. Natural and semi-natural areas experienced very little change in use. The presented results have implications for how planners design and manage green spaces to enable residents to cope with crises like pandemics into the future.
Highlights
Interaction with both people and nature is essential to humans
Decrease in distances were found for all Urban green infrastructure (UGI) categories suggesting that respondents were recreating in areas closer to home during the pandemic
The overarching aim of this paper was to examine how, under particular governmental restrictions and socio-ecological context, residents in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area have coped with the COVID-19 crisis by using different urban green and blue spaces in terms of both distance from domicile and quality of space
Summary
Interaction with both people and nature is essential to humans. Urban green infrastructure (UGI) supports everyday individual and group recreation, physical exercise and mental health (see reviews by Konijnendijk et al, 2013; Kabisch et al, 2015; Collins et al, 2020), including opportunities to cope with urban life through stress reduction (Hartig et al, 2003; Jiang et al, 2014; Ibes et al, 2018) and improved mood (Huynh and Torquati, 2019; Nisbet et al, 2019). Green Space Use COVID-19 enjoy from nature may have been even more vital during the COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdown and social restrictions. Various studies from cities around the world have indicated that physical exercise, spending time outdoors and restoration from increased mental stress, anxiety and feeling of isolation during lockdown, were essential for citizens in order to cope with the crisis (Grima et al, 2020; Lopez et al, 2020; Venter et al, 2020). Urban green spaces have the potential to mitigate some of the negative health effects of COVID-19 restrictions on mobility and social interaction when combined with social distancing (Kluge et al, 2020), and enhance resilience of urban populations during the pandemic (Samuelsson et al, 2020)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
