Indicator of Green space accessibility
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This issue is meant to help tracking the process of searching, selecting and generating the relevant explanatory variables (land use features) for modelling green space accessibility as a key indicator.
Note: UGS = Urban Green Space
Literature, relevant for methodology of UGS identification?
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12518-020-00314-7
Kmail, A.B., Onyango, V. A GIS-based assessment of green space accessibility: case study of Dundee. Appl Geomat 12, 491–499 (2020).
Recently, it has been proven that access to green spaces provide people with better health conditions and help in enhancing general public health and well-being for urban residents. Therefore, there is a need to assess the quality of green spaces to ensure that they are in good quality in terms of accessibility for example. This paper aims to assess the quality of green spaces in terms of accessibility in the city of Dundee, Scotland, based on employing GIS network analysis. The results showed that nearly two thirds of Dundonians have access to 2–20 ha green spaces within 300 m distance while nearly half of them have access to 20–100 ha and 100–500 ha green spaces within 2000 m and 5000 m distance, respectively. The findings of this research provide valuable evidence for public policy makers and urban planners in addition to the general public for framing future urban plans in a manner that enhance accessibility to green spaces. The employed methodology in this research can be used in other urban areas within and even beyond Scotland, if the required datasets are available and accessible.
more literature on UGS identification, note the OSM tags used in the process
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0204684
Le Texier M, Schiel K, Caruso G (2018) The provision of urban green space and its accessibility: Spatial data effects in Brussels. PLOS ONE 13(10): e0204684.
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.
WHO 2016 Report
https://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/321971/Urban-green-spaces-and-health-review-evidence.pdf
definition of UGS, indicators
Literature - worldwide visualisation of green space accessibility
- check sources
- methodology
- is the output available online as open data? wrote direct message to the author, awaiting response
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23998083221097110
Long, X., Chen, Y., Zhang, Y., & Zhou, Q. (2022). Visualizing green space accessibility for more than 4,000 cities across the globe. Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 49(5), 1578–1581.
Green space accessibility has benefits for promoting physical and mental health of urban residents. Many studies have investigated this measure but used limited cities. To fill this gap, this study visualizes green space accessibility for 4353 cities across the globe. Three global open datasets and two different scales (city- and national-scales) were involved for the analysis. We found that most countries and cities have a relative high value in terms of the green space accessibility, and those with a relatively low value are mostly located in South American, African, and Asian countries and cities. The results may be useful not only for local governments to implement precise planning for reducing potential inequality in access to green space, but also for researchers to further investigate the relationship between green space accessibility and various issues related to urban built-up environment.
- quoted from the above paper
- it is the actual research behind the WHO 2016 report (above)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26573907/
Annerstedt van den Bosch M, Mudu P, Uscila V, Barrdahl M, Kulinkina A, Staatsen B, Swart W, Kruize H, Zurlyte I, Egorov AI. Development of an urban green space indicator and the public health rationale. Scand J Public Health. 2016 Mar;44(2):159-67.
Aims: In this study, the aim was to develop and test an urban green space indicator for public health, as proposed by the World Health Organisation (WHO) Regional Office for Europe, in order to support health and environmental policies.
Methods: We defined the indicator of green space accessibility as a proportion of an urban population living within a certain distance from a green space boundary. We developed a Geographic Information System (GIS)-based method and tested it in three case studies in Malmö, Sweden; Kaunas, Lithuania; and Utrecht, The Netherlands. Land use data in GIS from the Urban Atlas were combined with population data. Various population data formats, maximum distances to green spaces, minimum sizes of green spaces, and different definitions of green spaces were studied or discussed.
Results: Our results demonstrated that with increasing size of green space and decreased distance to green space, the indicator value decreased. As compared to Malmö and Utrecht, a relatively bigger proportion of the Kaunas population had access to large green spaces, at both shorter and longer distances. Our results also showed that applying the method of spatially aggregated population data was an acceptable alternative to using individual data.
Conclusions: Based on reviewing the literature and the case studies, a 300 m maximum linear distance to the boundary of urban green spaces of a minimum size of 1 hectare are recommended as the default options for the indicator. The indicator can serve as a proxy measure for assessing public accessibility to urban green spaces, to provide comparable data across Europe and stimulate policy actions that recognise the importance of green spaces for sustainable public health.
literature review
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169204616302146
L. Taylor, D. F.Hochuli, Defining greenspace: Multiple uses across multiple disciplines, Landscape and Urban Planning, Volume 158, February 2017, Pages 25-38
- Most publications reviewed fail to define what is meant by the term greenspace.
- Of those that do provide a definition, six different definition types are identified.
- Two broad interpretations are used: a) greenspace as synonomous with nature; and.
- b) greenspace as explicitly urban vegetation.
- Recommend a definition is required that is both qualitative and quantitative