Urban Public Green Space Equity against the Context of High-Speed Urbanization in Wuhan, Central China

Association between UGS patterns and residents' health status: A report on residents' health in China's old industrial areas

BACKGROUND

Old industrial areas have low quality and spatial differentiation of urban green space (UGS), which makes it difficult to meet the public's physical activity needs and leads to increased health risks. The purpose of this study is to explore the equity of UGS patterns in old industrial areas and its internal relationship with residents' health status.

METHODS

This study selecteds relevant indicators to evaluate the equity of UGS patterns in the Harbin area and used linear regression analysis to explore the correlation between attributes of old industrial areas and UGS patterns. Additionally, this study explored the spatial correlation of UGSs using Moran's index and hotspot analysis. Finally, a report on residents' health was generated through a questionnaire survey, using linear regression analysis to explore the factors affecting residents' self-rated health and the significance of their correlation.

RESULTS

The results showed that there is an excess supply around the core industrial zone in the west, while the rural areas in the south face a serious shortage of supply. The significance between the factors representing age and income in industrial attributes and UGS pattern was less than 0.05. We observed that residents' self-rated health was positively affected by the intensity of physical activity (low intensity B = 2.073, medium intensity B = 2.359, high intensity B = 2.512) and the frequency of physical activity (B = 1.174). Ages (B = -0.597) and three generations living together (B = -3.191), which represent the industrial attributes, had a negative impact on residents' self-rated health.

CONCLUSION

To a certain extent, industrial attributes aggravate the mismatch of UGS patterns, leading to abnormal areas in spatial clustering. The quality of UGS in the old industrial zone is low and the movement is not strong; thus, the population characteristics and income have become the important factors affecting the health of residents.

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.

Benchmarking City Layouts—A Methodological Approach and an Accessibility Comparison between a Real City and the Garden City

This article presents a comparative accessibility study between a real city and its redraft as a Garden City. The benchmarking methodology involves defining and evaluating a location-based accessibility indicator in a GIS environment for the city of Coimbra, Portugal, and for the same city laid out as a Garden City, with the same number of inhabitants, jobs, and similar number of urban facilities. The results are derived as maps and weighted average distances per inhabitant to the facilities and jobs, and show that, for the Garden City, average distances drop to around 500 m for urban facilities and 1500 m for the combination of facilities and jobs, making much of the city accessible by walking and practically the whole of it accessible by cycling, with positive impact on transport sustainability and accessibility equity. The methodology can be extended to other benchmarking indicators and city layouts, and the quantitative results it yields make a valuable contribution to the debate on the ideal layout of cities. Moreover, it gives directions on how to improve real cities to address current and future sustainability concerns.

Rapid Mapping and Annual Dynamic Evaluation of Quality of Urban Green Spaces on Google Earth Engine

In order to achieve the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) related to green spaces, monitoring dynamic urban green spaces (UGSs) in cities around the world is crucial. Continuous dynamic UGS mapping is challenged by large computation, time consumption, and energy consumption requirements. Therefore, a fast and automated workflow is needed to produce a high-precision UGS map. In this study, we proposed an automatic workflow to produce up-to-date UGS maps using Otsu’s algorithm, a Random Forest (RF) classifier, and the migrating training samples method in the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform. We took the central urban area of Beijing, China, as the study area to validate this method, and we rapidly obtained an annual UGS map of the central urban area of Beijing from 2016 to 2020. The accuracy assessment results showed that the average overall accuracy (OA) and kappa coefficient (KC) were 96.47% and 94.25%, respectively. Additionally, we used six indicators to measure quality and temporal changes in the UGS spatial distribution between 2016 and 2020. In particular, we evaluated the quality of UGS using the urban greenness index (UGI) and Shannon’s diversity index (SHDI) at the pixel level. The experimental results indicate the following: (1) The UGSs in the center of Beijing increased by 48.62 km2 from 2016 to 2020, and the increase was mainly focused in Chaoyang, Fengtai, and Shijingshan Districts. (2) The average proportion of relatively high and above levels (UGI > 0.5) in six districts increased by 2.71% in the study area from 2016 to 2020, and this proportion peaked at 36.04% in 2018. However, our result revealed that the increase was non-linear during this assessment period. (3) Although there was no significant increase or decrease in SHDI values in the study area, the distribution of the SHDI displayed a noticeable fluctuation in the northwest, southwest, and northeast regions of the study area between 2016 and 2020. Furthermore, we discussed and analyzed the influence of population on the spatial distribution of UGSs. We found that three of the five cold spots were located in the east and southeast of Haidian District. Therefore, the proposed workflow could provide rapid mapping and dynamic evaluation of the quality of UGS.

Community-Level Urban Green Space Equity Evaluation Based on Spatial Design Network Analysis (sDNA): A Case Study of Central Wuhan, China

Urban green spaces (UGSs) provide numerous irreplaceable environmental and social benefits to humankind, but the lack of baseline information makes it difficult to propose a reasonable greening strategy so as to achieve an equitable allocation of community green spaces. This paper divides UGSs into three classes using the spatial design network analysis (sDNA) and quantifies the UGS accessibility of communities in central Wuhan. Based on these results and the Gini coefficient, we analyze the UGS equity of the spatial distribution at the community level, then propose future greening strategies both at the city and community levels. The results show that the railway station and old Wuhan city are the core areas of traffic network strength (TNS). UGSs are evenly distributed in the core areas of TNS, but the number of UGSs in non-core areas is small, and their distribution is relatively uneven, and the number of communities with medium UGS accessibility is the largest, carrying the densest residential population. Most communities perform well in terms of UGS equity, but the UGS equity of 163 communities, covering a population of more than one million, remains to be improved. The method and conclusions of this study will contribute to the future greening policy making of 965 communities in central Wuhan, thus promoting the orderly planning and high-quality construction of community living circles.