Abstract
The increases in urbanization, pollution, resource depletion, and climate change underline the need for urban planning policies that incorporate blue–green infrastructure (BGI) and ecosystem services. This paper proposes a framework for assessing BGI’s effect on children’s outdoor activities. This effect, called meaningful usefulness, is a central issue due to the influence of experiences with nature on children’s development and the global trend of concentration of children in urban areas. Based on the concept of affordance, the methodology formalizes meaningful usefulness in terms of an index of usefulness of individual settings (IUIS) and a synthetic index of usefulness of BGI in a specific area (ISGI). These are determined via an audit protocol, Opportunities for Children in Urban Spaces (OCUS), which incorporates a set of indicators measuring micro-scale properties of individual places and contextual macro-scale factors. The methodology is applied to BGI components in Cagliari, Sardinia, Italy, which was selected for its superior density of urban green spaces. The application of the OCUS tool confirms its usefulness for investigating functional affordances incorporated into the trans-scalar structures of BGIs. The analytic protocol further contributes to the implementation of urban planning strategies within the smart city paradigm.
Highlights
As Martintotti [1] observed, the city needs to be celebrated as the product and heart of the most advanced manifestation of civilization, the center for commerce, learning, and culture, and the production of the most significant scientific and technological advancements.The emergence—and triumph—of cities manifests in the global process of mass urbanization, a trend determining that “today, half the world’s population lives in urban areas and, by 2050, all regions will be predominantly urban
As stated in the introduction, this paper focuses on the social dimension of ecosystem services and highlights the relevance of urban blue–green infrastructure (BGI) components in terms of children’s nature experiences and independent outdoor activities
This research underlines a perspective in urban planning founded on the intersection among research on ecosystem services, blue–green infrastructures, and child-friendly cities
Summary
As Martintotti [1] observed, the city needs to be celebrated as the product and heart of the most advanced manifestation of civilization, the center for commerce, learning, and culture, and the production of the most significant scientific and technological advancements.The emergence—and triumph—of cities manifests in the global process of mass urbanization, a trend determining that “today, half the world’s population lives in urban areas and, by 2050, all regions will be predominantly urban. These phenomena, alongside the “preoccupation with preventing and minimizing the effects of the natural or manmade disaster” and the need to preserve the centrality of cities as places of excellence, will determine the formulation and implementation of urban paradigms that orient the transformation of the built environment, including the smart city paradigm The latter calls for governance practices and planning strategies that activate synergies among traditional infrastructures, information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructures, and socio-economic structures aimed at supporting sustainable economic development and a high quality of life, with proper management of natural resources through participatory action and engagement [4]. The green infrastructure-based approach emerges as a key tool for re-configuring the city as an inclusive, healthy, anti-fragile, connected urban ecosystem by achieving a balance among urban and ecological processes and systems, increasing biodiversity, and incorporating resilience measures for preventing and minimizing effects of storm, flood, heat, drought, and pollution [3]
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