Indicators for the Planning and Management of Urban Green Spaces: A Focus on Public Areas in Padua, Italy

Sustainability Assessment through Urban Accessibility Indicators and GIS in a Middle-Sized World Heritage City: The Case of Cáceres, Spain

The main objective of the research consists of quantifying the degree of sustainability of the city of Cáceres in terms of the inhabitant’s accessibility to public services through the use of GIS tools and urban indicators, taking into account two areas of study: The Historic Centre (PCH) and the city as a whole. The methodology applied is based on the criteria proposed by the Spanish Government derived from the Spanish Strategy for Urban and Local Sustainability (EESUL), which suggests suitable indicators for analysing urban environments. The degree of sustainability of the study areas, applied to the field of mobility and accessibility to public services, is evaluated through numerical calculations complementing the study with accessibility maps obtained using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) tools. The results show that the city of Cáceres is sustainable in terms of accessibility to bus stops, organic waste containers, household waste recycling centre, schools and education, health centres, and public administration. However, bike parking coverage and lanes, clothes and oil collection, and sports centres need to be further enhanced. In conclusion, there is little disparity in the results between the PCH and the city as a whole, not influenced by the fact that one of the areas is a consolidated historic area. This research has allowed some gaps in the topic to be addressed. However, the main limitation of this methodology consists in the need to have a considerable amount of initial starting data to be able to carry out the research. Finally, the sustainability analysis using urban indicators is considered a valuable source of information for the local manager, becoming a real planning tool in medium-sized cities.

Citizen Science Data to Measure Human Use of Green Areas and Forests in European Cities

Understanding and explaining the use of green spaces and forests is challenging for sustainable urban planning. In recent years there has been increasing demand for novel approaches to investigate urban green infrastructure by capitalizing on large databases from existing citizen science tools. In this study, we analyzed iNaturalist data to perform an assessment of the intentional use of these urban spaces for their value and to understand the main drivers. We retrieved the total number of observations obtained across a set of 672 European cities and focused on reporting from mapped green areas and forests. We used two separate multivariate explanatory models to investigate which factors explained variations in the number of observations for green areas and forests. We found a relatively heterogeneous use of these two urban green spaces. Gross domestic product was important in explaining the number of visits. Availability and accessibility also had positive relationships with the use of green areas and forests in cities, respectively. This study paves the way for better integration of citizen science data in assessing cultural services provided by urban green infrastructure and therefore in supporting the evaluation of spatial planning policies for the sustainable development of urban areas.