Abstract
Rapid economic development and population growth has led to urban densification and massive land use changes, putting pressure on both ecosystems, and people. In this context, public health issues have become crucial for cities to address to ensure they remain livable and healthy for everyone. Since the health challenges of cities tend to manifest themselves differently among different population groups—e.g., groups of higher socioeconomic status tend to be correlated with better health than groups of low socioeconomic status—closing the health gap has become a priority for creating healthy cities for everyone. More greenness close to where people live and better accessibility to green areas has been shown to be useful for improving human health and for tackling health inequalities. This paper aims at developing a method for supporting urban planners and policymakers on where to geographically prioritize investments in green infrastructure to contribute to closing the health gap and promote community resilience through improving public health. Using the City of Stockholm as a pilot, we apply a GIS analysis to identify vulnerable population groups in relation to geotagged empirical human health- and socio-economic data. By then assessing vulnerable populations in relation to population numbers and accessibility to urban green areas, an Urban Green Opportunity Map (UGOM) was created, identifying focus areas where investment in green infrastructure will contribute most to closing the health gap and building community resilience.
Highlights
The rapid economic development of the past decades combined with current and predicted population growth has led to the loss of green areas outside and inside urban areas due to city expansion and city compaction respectively, putting pressure on both ecosystems and people (Folke et al, 2011; Seto et al, 2011; Berghauser Pont et al, 2017; Gren et al, 2019; Colding et al, 2020)
The aggregated urban green accessibility map (UGAM) (Figure 5) shows the median attraction reach per base area in the City of Stockholm
Our method aims at identifying locations where investing in green infrastructure will provide health benefits to the highest number of the most vulnerable people with the lowest accessibility to urban green areas
Summary
The rapid economic development of the past decades combined with current and predicted population growth has led to the loss of green areas outside and inside urban areas due to city expansion and city compaction respectively, putting pressure on both ecosystems and people (Folke et al, 2011; Seto et al, 2011; Berghauser Pont et al, 2017; Gren et al, 2019; Colding et al, 2020). A growing body of literature has shown that more greenness close to where people live and better accessibility to green areas are useful for improving human health (Nowak et al, 2006; Stigsdotter et al, 2010; van den Berg et al, 2010; Villeneuve et al, 2012; Ward Thompson et al, 2012; Markevych et al, 2014) Such urban green related health benefits have been shown to be effective in tackling health inequalities brought by socio-economic factors (Braubach et al, 2017) and have even been shown to have proportionally larger positive effects on populations from lower socioeconomic groups, which are generally considered at higher risk of poverty-related stress and associated health issues (Mitchell and Popham, 2008). We in this paper, due to the reasons stated above, are primarily concerned with tackling health inequalities from a socio-economic perspective, there are undoubtedly other valid perspectives in this context, such as immutable characteristics, e.g., gender and age (Ode Sang et al, 2016)
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