Public Green Space Planning and Management towards Livable City

Abstract

Urban public green spaces (PGS), with their ecological, health support, and social functions needed by the community, would grow in terms of absolute number and spatial distributed populations. However, PGS's volume and spatial areas did not expand linearly to population growth; even in some cases, there has even been a decrease in volume and area for PGS. This paper examines PGS's planning process and management, which faces problems due to the population growth that requires more settlement areas and other socioeconomic facilities. The methodology applied was a comparative study in planning and managing PGS for two cases, Munich and the Yogyakarta municipal areas, which regionally have similar characteristics. The result shows that both regions tend to have proper governance for PGS. Also, both regions tend to have similar urban spatial structures associated with distributed growth centers of the polycentric system and address similar problems related to population growth. Despite the facts, both have differences in community perception of livable city function, especially for community cultural and social-relational aspects. In conclusion, this paper has highlighted that PGS's comprehensive planning is indispensable to achieve ecological, health support, and social functions to attain a livable city; therefore, a dynamic spatial model that considers variables: housing demand, urban spatial structure, urban growth form, and also community participation, could be a useful detecting tool to measure the level of development.