Abstract
Despite much attention in the literature, knowledge about the dynamics surrounding urban densification and urban greening is still in dire need for architects, urban planners and scientists that strive to design, develop, and regenerate sustainable and resilient urban environments. Here, we investigate countrywide patterns of changes in residential density and residential nature at high spatial resolution over a time period of >20 years (1995–2016), combining a dataset of address-level population data covering all of Denmark (>2 million address points) with satellite image-derived normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI) data. Our results show that many residential environments across Denmark have witnessed simultaneous densification and greening since the mid-1990s. In fact, the most common change within 500 m neighbourhoods around individual address points is of joint increases in population and NDVI (28%), followed by increasing NDVI with stable population figures (21%). In contrast, only 8% of neighbourhoods around address points have seen a decline in either population or NDVI. Results were similar in low- middle- and high-density environments, suggesting that trends were driven by climate change but also to some degree enabled by urban planning policies that seek to increase rather than decrease nature in the cities.
Highlights
We investigate countrywide patterns of changes in residential density and residential nature at high spatial resolution over a time period of >20 years (1995–2016), combining a dataset of address-level population data covering all of Denmark (>2 million address points) with satellite image-derived normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI) data
Our results show that many residential environments across Denmark have witnessed simultaneous densification and greening since the mid-1990s
As the patterns of changes within 250 and 1000 m neighbourhood sizes did not differ considerably, the results section focuses on changes within 500 m of address points (NDVI values reported are median values from 1 May to 31 August unless otherwise stated)
Summary
While the above outlined relationships between specific environmental factors and well-being are well studied, there is a relative absence of studies looking at patterns over time of density and nature in combination. A recent study found large parts of Berlin to have undergone simultaneous residential densification and greening over the last decade [16] We complement these studies by investigating patterns of residential density and residential nature over a time period of >20 years (1995–2016) across Denmark. Rather than analysing NDVI across the complete landscape, we combine it with a dataset of addresslevel population data (>2 million address points) to estimate neighbourhood-scale exposure to nature [24]. This allows nationwide co-analysis with detailed measures of residential population density. We investigate neighbourhood changes in residential density and NDVI from 1995 to 2016, first across all Danish residential environments, and broken down into categories of low-, medium- and high-residential density
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