Abstract
Urban green space (UGS) has many environmental and social benefits. UGS provision and access are increasingly considered in urban policies and must rely on data and indicators that can capture variations in the distribution of UGS within cities. There is no consensus about how UGS, and their provision and access, must be defined from different land use data types. Here we identify four spatial dimensions of UGS and critically examine how different data sources affect these dimensions and our understanding of their variation within a city region (Brussels). We compare UGS indicators measured from an imagery source (NDVI from Landsat), an official cadastre-based map, and the voluntary geographical information provided by OpenStreetMap (OSM). We compare aggregate values of provision and access to UGS as well as their spatial distribution along a centrality gradient and at neighbourhood scale. We find that there are strong differences in the value of indicators when using the different datasets, especially due to their ability to capture private and public green space. However we find that the interpretation of intra-urban spatial variations is not affected by changes in data source. Centrality in particular is a strong determinant of the relative values of UGS availability, fragmentation and accessibility, irrespective of datasets.
Highlights
In the past three decades a significant amount of scientific studies in urban geography, planning and environmental disciplines have shown that the environmental, ecological and social benefits of urban green space (UGS) vary according to size, distance and accessibility([1, 2], for early references)
We propose a method to critically examine the extent to which the data sources affect the different dimensions of green space provision and access, and eventually, our capacity to generalise across cases the source of spatial inequalities in the benefits obtained from UGS [18, 41]
The method used to calculate the private urban green space with UrbIS data does tend to overestimate the green due to the point mentioned above that not all interior private parcels are green—this method could be improved through combining the results of this method, with the results of the Landsat green extraction to get a more accurate value
Summary
In the past three decades a significant amount of scientific studies in urban geography, planning and environmental disciplines have shown that the environmental, ecological and social benefits of urban green space (UGS) vary according to size, distance and accessibility([1, 2], for early references). The European Environment Agency [4] recommends that people should have access to green space within 15 min walking distance (1.61 kilometers / 1 mile). Average access to UGS is not sufficient because their spatial distribution may result in significant bias towards certain locations and social groups [5,6,7,8].
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