Urban Green Spaces—An Underestimated Resource in Third-Tier Towns in Poland

Marcin Feltynowski,Jakub Kronenberg

doi:10.3390/land9110453

Abstract

Urban green spaces are frequently presented as being important for urban quality of life and urban development in general, but more detailed interpretations and discussions are typically confined to large urban centers, the so-called first- and second-tier cities. Not enough attention has been paid to smaller urban units, the third-tier towns. The main goal of this article is to investigate the share and types of urban green spaces in five selected towns in Poland. We compare different sources of data based on satellite imagery and land-use maps with those used in public statistics, to check whether town authorities are managing all potential green spaces or only a selected part of them. We find that the predominantly used data, based on what is classified as “urban green space” for the purposes of public statistics, obscure the complexity of urban green spaces and focus on the narrowly understood formally managed public green spaces (which occupy 3.5–5.7% of town areas). Meanwhile, based on other sources, such as the national land-use map (BDOT10k), Urban Atlas, and satellite imagery (Landsat 8), what is considered to be green space turns out to cover 50–80% of the town area. The latter large numbers are associated with the predominance of arable land, grasslands, and forests, overlooked in any green space management practices based on data and definitions adopted for the purposes of public statistics. The situation found in our five case study towns resembles that identified in larger cities in Poland, and it exhibits the inadequacy of public statistics definitions and the related management practices, hindering the management of urban green spaces as an interconnected system of urban green infrastructures.

Highlights

The situation found in our five case study towns resembles that identified in larger cities in Poland, and it exhibits the inadequacy of public statistics definitions and the related management practices, hindering the management of urban green spaces as an interconnected system of urban green infrastructures
The official data based on public statistics stand out as an outlier, indicating 3.5–5.7% of town areas covered by green space, while other sources of data reveal about 50–80% (Table 5)
The differences prove to be greater in towns that have a larger number of housing estates, as this kind of spatial configuration of a town allows for the noting of elements that may be categorized as urban green space, despite being located in housing-estates

Summary

Introduction

Urban green spaces provide numerous benefits to urban inhabitants [1,2], and they have been recognized as having an important contribution to health and quality of life in urban areas [3,4].For these reasons, urban green spaces are increasingly considered an essential aspect of urban planning and management [5,6]. most discussions on urban green spaces and the ecosystem services they provide refer to “cities and towns” [7,8,9,10], cities attract disproportionately more attention [11,12] (for exceptions, see, References [13,14]). Urban green spaces provide numerous benefits to urban inhabitants [1,2], and they have been recognized as having an important contribution to health and quality of life in urban areas [3,4]. Limited attention paid to green spaces in towns and smaller cities (hereafter collectively referred to as towns)—especially when compared to the broad debate focusing on larger cities—represents a research gap that needs to be filled. This gap is important given that towns host a large share of the urban population worldwide, and even in some of the most urbanized countries in Europe, such as Belgium or Germany, more people

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