Search Results (3,053)

Urban Green Space Per Capita (UGSPC) is one of the oldest and most widely applied indicators in urban planning, providing a measure of green areas in relation to the population size. Despite its century-long application and decades of research, no global systematic review has previously synthesized how UGSPC has been applied, interpreted, and evolved across different contexts. This study aims to fill that gap by conducting the first comprehensive systematic review, following PRISMA guidelines, examining the usage, trends, and effectiveness of UGSPC in both developed and developing countries. Thematic analysis revealed that most studies were published in journals focused on sustainability and environmental science. The results show a surge in publications following the COVID-19 pandemic, reflecting a growing recognition of the importance of urban green spaces for public health and livability. Moreover, 67% of the studies were conducted in developing countries, while 30% of the publications were in developed countries. Higher UGSPC values are generally found in developed cities; however, this was not a rule. Time series studies showed a decline in UGSPC in some developed and developing countries, influenced by factors such as population density, urbanization stage, climate, and economic conditions. Although UGSPC is widely used, most municipalities typically develop their plans based on this measurement. In total, 95% of the included research incorporated additional measurements, including accessibility, social equity, spatial patterns, ecological services, ecosystem benefits, and human health. This study suggests that UGSPC is still used as an indicator in urban planning and policy and integrating it with other indicators can serve as contemporary indicators to capture better equity, functionality, and sustainability in urban environments. Full article

The rapid urban expansion in the past few decades has resulted in a deficit of urban green space, and green roofs have become an effective way to expand urban green spaces. High nitrogen (N) deposition induced by urban development has threatened the health and sustainability of plants. The aim of this study was to evaluate the responses of plant growth performance and aesthetic value to N deposition in green roofs. Eleven species from four plant functional groups were grown under control, low N addition, and high N addition conditions to assess the effects of N addition on their growth performance, aesthetic value, soil properties, and plant functional traits. Different plant functional groups exhibited distinct traits, and their response to N addition was different. Under high N addition, the growth performance of sod-forming graminoids and tall forbs decreased by 47.0% and 23.7%, and their aesthetic value decreased by 24.4% and 16.2%, respectively. Growth performance of plant functional groups was mainly determined by plant functional traits rather than soil properties. The poor growth performance and aesthetic value of sod-forming graminoids and tall forbs challenged their widespread use under high N addition. This study highlighted the importance of selecting environmentally adaptive species from the perspective of plant functional groups, especially in the context of future high N deposition. Full article

The ICESat-2 satellite collects LiDAR data along linear orbital tracks using a photon-counting green wavelength (532.27 nm) instrument. The utility of combining ICESat-2 data with satellite imagery for training and subsequently applying satellite-derived bathymetry models to provide estimates of shallow water depth is well-established. However, automating and improving the accuracy of the identification of ICESat-2 photon events (PEs) representing bathymetry remains a challenge. This article presents an algorithm for automated extraction of PEs reflected from the ocean floor (rather than the ocean surface or noise in the water column). The algorithm is unique in examining both the density of PEs surrounding a subject PE and their position relative to the subject PE. This is accomplished by establishing three concentric ellipses around the subject PE, dividing them into radial “sectors” in 2D space (along-track vs. PE depth/height), recording the number of neighboring PEs in each sector and using this information to fit a LightGBM model. Agreement with PEs identified by an image interpreter is approximately 98%. Testing suggests that the accuracy of the algorithm is relatively insensitive to the size and shape of the ellipses used to define a PE’s neighborhood and to the number of radial sectors used. The model produced also appears to be robust across different geographic areas and data densities. Full article

Pocket parks serve as vital everyday green spaces in high-density cities, yet many remain underused, especially in hot–humid regions where thermal discomfort restricts outdoor activities. Traditional pocket-park classification approaches overlook actual usage patterns of pocket parks, and existing studies have not examined whether thermal environments influence pocket park use, nor have they adequately addressed thermal comfort from the perspective of user needs. To address these gaps, this study investigates usage behavior, thermal environments, and thermal comfort demands in pocket parks in Guangzhou, a representative hot–humid city in southern China. Through a preliminary reconnaissance survey, this study selected three typical pocket parks for detailed case-study investigation, and the corresponding usage characteristics were systematically identified. Thermal environments and thermal comfort demands were collected separately through on-site thermal measurements and questionnaire surveys. Correlation and comparative analyses were then conducted to examine the relationships among usage characteristics, thermal environmental conditions, and thermal comfort. The findings reveal that (1) the usage rate of residential pocket parks showed the most sensitivity to WBGT, followed by business pocket parks, while the usage rate of traffic pocket parks showed no significant correlation with WBGT; and (2) business parks had the highest thermal sensitivity with PET, followed by residential and traffic types. A one-unit decrease in TSV corresponds to PET reductions of 11.1 °C, 12.5 °C, and 16.6 °C for business, residential, and traffic parks, respectively; (3) among thermal environmental parameters, wind speed exerted the greatest influence on the subjective thermal responses of users in both residential and business pocket parks. As for usage characteristics, activity type was the most significant factor affecting the thermal sensation of users in the traffic pocket park, while short-term thermal experience played the dominant role for users in the business pocket park. The results of this study offer a scientific basis for user-centered, climate-responsive design strategies for pocket parks in hot–humid regions. Full article

The integration of electric buses into urban transportation networks is a priority for policymakers aiming to promote sustainable public mobility. Among available technologies, electric Bus Rapid Transit (eBRT) systems offer an environmentally friendly and operationally effective alternative to conventional modes. This study introduces a Machine Learning Decision Support Framework designed to assess the feasibility of deploying eBRT systems in urban environments. Using a dataset of 28 routes in the Athens Metropolitan Area, the framework integrates diverse variables such as land use, population coverage, proximity to public transport, points of interest, road characteristics, and safety indicators. The XGBoost model demonstrated strong predictive performance, outperforming traditional approaches and highlighting the significance of points of interest, land use diversity, green spaces, and roadway infrastructure in forecasting travel times. Overall, the proposed framework provides urban planners and policymakers with a robust, data-driven tool for evaluating the practical and environmental viability of eBRT systems. Full article

Amidst the paradigm shift in park city development from quantitative metrics to spatial performance, urban complex parks—a novel green space type developed privately yet fulfilling public functions—present an innovative approach to park provision in high-density urban areas. However, systematic empirical evidence on their social value remains scarce. This study characterizes urban complex parks as a new form of green public space that provides key ecosystem services and proposes a three-dimensional evaluation framework integrating “usage vitality, place attractiveness, and user satisfaction.” Analyzing 19 park-equipped complexes among 75 cases in Shanghai using LBS data and online reviews through controlled linear regression and comparative analysis, our results indicate complexes with parks were associated with significantly outperforming others in place attractiveness and user satisfaction. Key findings include associations with a 413.7 m increase in average OD distance, a 3.4–4.0% higher city-level visitor share, and 5.24 percentage points greater median positive review rate. Crucially, spatial location outweighs green ratio and size in determining social value. Ground-level parks, through superior spatial integration, function as effective “social-ecological interfaces,” significantly outperforming rooftop parks in attracting long-distance visitors, stabilizing foot traffic (≈3% lower fluctuation), and enhancing per-store visitation. This demonstrates that green space quality (experiential quality and spatial configuration) matters more than quantity. Our findings suggest that urban complex parks can create social value through perceivable naturalness and restorative environments, providing an empirical basis for optimizing park city implementation in high-density contexts and highlighting the need to reconcile broad attractiveness with equitable local access. Full article

Current assessments of urban green spaces (UGS) rely largely on two-dimensional (2D) indicators, which fail to capture the three-dimensional (3D) structure necessary for evaluating ecological functions and human exposure. Among these, the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) describes top-down canopy greenness from a nadir perspective, whereas the Green View Index (GVI) quantifies vegetation visibility at street level from a pedestrian perspective. Because the relationship between NDVI and GVI remains unclear, multi-indicator assessments become difficult to interpret, limiting their ability to jointly characterize urban greenery. To address these gaps, we develop a synergy framework that integrates remote sensing with street-view images. First, we aligned the observation scales through street-view depth estimation and converted NDVI into fractional vegetation cover (FVC) through nonlinear mapping to unify measurement units. Correlation experiments revealed that the consistency between GVI and FVC was weak across the city (R² = 0.27) but substantially stronger along arterial roads with continuous vegetation (R² = 0.61). On this basis, we design a Green Synergy Index (GSI) that combines FVC and GVI using fractional power-law adjustments and an interaction term to capture their joint effects. Robustness tests indicate that GSI effectively handles extreme or mismatched cases, differentiates greening patterns, and integrates complementary information from nadir and street views without numerical instability. Furthermore, we assess the consistency between GSI and land surface temperature (LST), showing that the proposed index improves explanatory power compared with FVC and GVI alone (by 5.6% and 8.8%, respectively). Application to the study area yields a mean GSI value of 0.44 on a 0–1 scale, with spatial variations closely associated with road geometry and functional zoning. This enables the identification of mismatched canopy and visibility segments and supports targeted, climate-sensitive green infrastructure planning. Full article

Environmental assessment in high-density urban areas faces significant challenges due to complex building morphology and the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP). This study proposes a morphology-adaptive computational framework that integrates the Homogeneous Unit of Building Morphology (HUBM) with geospatial modeling to enhance environmental assessment processes. Using Macao as a case study, the framework quantifies local and accessibility-based ecosystem service flows and evaluates ecological resilience via ecological security patterns and spatial elasticity indices. The results demonstrate that HUBM substantially reduces MAUP-induced biases compared to traditional grid-based approaches, maintaining statistical significance in spatial clustering analyses across all scales. Functionally, ecosystem service value (ESV) analysis reveals that natural green spaces provide more than three times the total ESV, predominantly offering regulating services, while artificial green spaces primarily deliver localized services. Accessibility analysis highlights considerable spatial inequities, with natural green spaces exhibiting a significantly higher recreational accessibility index. In terms of ecological security patterns (ESPs), natural green spaces function as core ecological patches, while artificial green spaces dominate connectivity, accounting for 75% of corridor length and 86% of node density. Natural green spaces exhibit significantly greater ecological resilience. These findings highlight the complementary roles of natural and artificial green spaces in dense urban environments and underscore the need for adaptive spatial analysis in urban planning. Full article

Green infrastructure and nature-based solutions (NBSs) are, especially in urban areas, one of the key elements in building a friendly living environment that contributes to healthy longevity. This paper presents a novel method for assessing the accessibility of recreational urban green space (RUGS) at the level of individual residential buildings. We designed and piloted a new total accessible recreational urban green space area (TARUGS) index, based on real pedestrian network distances, considering spatial accessibility weighted by the total area of green space available within an approximate 15-min walk. Calculations were carried out individually for each residential building and each individual RUGS, using GIS technologies, including network analysis. The developed methodology allows for the detection of local inequalities in access to all city RUGSs. It enables the inclusion of additional socioeconomic variables in an in-depth spatial equity analysis. The RUGS accessibility ranking of buildings provides a practical tool to support urban intervention planning, as well as the design of solutions that respond to the real needs of residents and environmental challenges. Availability analyses were performed for 108,618 buildings and 146 RUGS. Areas with the highest and clearly insufficient access to RUGS in Warsaw were identified. Over 40,400 buildings were classified as having no access to RUGS (class 0), which accounts for 37% of all residential buildings, while 21,700 buildings were classified as having the best access (class 4), which accounts for 20% of all residential buildings. The districts of Wilanów and Włochy have the worst accessibility, while Wawer and Mokotów have the best. The proposed building-level methodology quantitatively reveals spatial inequalities in access to RUGS, enabling data-driven, equitable planning decisions while highlighting the need to integrate broader accessibility modes, subjective user experiences, and data improvements for a comprehensive assessment of spatial justice. The framework demonstrates how advanced geospatial data analysis, integrating GIS technologies, open data, and network-based innovative solutions, could enhance urban policy-making, improve the design of equitable public spaces, and support resilient land management strategies. Full article

Increasing the level of livability in cities is a topical area both in EU policies and in local urban development, as well as in scientific studies. The aim of this article is to assess the degree if livability of the large housing estates (LHEs) built during the socialist period in the main regional cities of Romania and how adequately they meet the requirements of current urban life. The research focused on assessing the accessibility of these neighborhoods to green spaces and other types of public facilities and services of interest, also taking into account the typology of LHEs. For this, we used mixed research methods, namely GIS remote sensing, fieldwork, and questionnaire surveys, with the results being digitally processed and mapped. This comparative research allowed us to see to what extent each type of neighborhood lends itself to the application of the European Green Deal principles (EGD). In this sense, we mapped the transformations undergone by urban green spaces, as a major dimension of sustainability, and we created an LHE accessibility index, using eight groups of indicators. Based on this index, we assessed the degree of livability and the compatibility of LHEs with some of the EGD principles. We believe that this study can be applied in other regions with similar characteristics, for the analysis of territorial accessibility of public services, in the creation of quality of life registers, or for the planning of spatial components of green cities. Full article

As urban architecture continues to emphasize integration with natural environments, the concept of waterfront buildings and blue–green spaces has been widely applied in the site selection of large urban structures. While existing research has extensively explored architectural types such as waterfront landscapes and sports venues, systematic studies on waterfront concert halls, as an important category of cultural architecture, remain limited. Specifically, the interaction mechanisms between such halls and their aquatic environments, as well as their impact on users’ psychological satisfaction, have not been thoroughly investigated. This study takes waterfront concert halls as representative cultural buildings and examines 1267 users from 12 typical waterfront concert halls across eight cities in China. A theoretical model was constructed with water visibility, water accessibility, water interactivity, and water integration as independent variables, biophilia and a sense of nature’s presence as parallel mediators, and user satisfaction as the dependent variable. Data were analyzed using covariance based structural equation modeling CB-SEM. The findings reveal that (1) water visibility, water accessibility, and water integration positively influence user satisfaction; (2) biophilia mediates the relationship between water visibility, water accessibility, water interactivity, water integration, and user satisfaction; (3) a sense of nature’s presence also mediates the relationship between these water-related variables and user satisfaction. This study empirically demonstrates the dual pathway psychological mechanism through which water elements influence user satisfaction, providing a new perspective for the design of waterfront cultural architecture. The research suggests that architects can enhance users’ biophilic instincts and sense of nature’s presence through specific design strategies, such as strengthening water visibility, optimizing waterfront circulation, and enriching water interaction experiences. These findings offer theoretical support for shifting contemporary architectural practice from physical space creation to environmental well-being promotion, while also establishing a practical foundation for developing human-centered evaluation systems for built environments. Full article

Although previous studies have extensively explored the relationship between urban green spaces and residents’ well-being, research on how nature-based sports venues enhance urban well-being through multiple emotional mechanisms remains relatively limited. Drawing on environmental psychology, place attachment theory, and the principles of biophilic design, this study constructs a dual-mediation model incorporating Connectedness to Nature (CN) and Place Attachment (PA) to examine the pathways through which natural design features—including Natural Visibility (NV), Spatial Integration (SI), and Human–Nature Interactivity (HNI)—influence individuals’ urban well-being. Using ten representative nature-integrated sports venues in China as research sites, a total of 856 valid questionnaires were collected, and structural equation modeling (SEM) was applied for empirical analysis. The results show that (1) NV, SI, and HNI all exert significant positive effects on CN and PA; (2) CN significantly promotes both PA and Urban Well-being (UWB); (3) PA has a significant positive effect on UWB; and (4) both CN and PA serve as significant mediators between natural design features and UWB, with an evident serial mediation effect from CN to PA. These findings reveal the multilayered psychological mechanisms through which nature-based sports venues enhance residents’ well-being, enrich the theoretical framework of nature-oriented design and urban sustainability, and provide empirical evidence for the health-oriented and emotion-responsive design of urban sports facilities. Full article

We examine how Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) shapes the Quality of Economic Development (QED) amid rapid digitalization and the green transition. Using a balanced panel of 30 Chinese provinces (2013–2023), we construct a multidimensional, entropy-weighted QED index and combine two-way fixed effects with an instrumental-variables approach (regional graduate flows) to reduce endogeneity concerns. Mechanisms are traced via sequential-equation mediation with bias-corrected bootstrap inference, and funding nonlinearity is tested with a panel threshold model. We find a positive, robust TVET effect on QED. Two channels, entrepreneurial vitality and industrial structure upgrading, mediate a meaningful share of the impact. Effects are heterogeneous across space, with the strongest in the eastern provinces, moderate in the western provinces, and not statistically significant in the centre. Per-student funding exhibits dual thresholds: returns are negligible below the first cut-off (≈¥16,000) and rise sharply above the second (≈¥17,000), which helps explain regional disparities. Using established methods applied consistently across a long provincial panel, this study quantifies the strength and channels of the TVET–QED relationship and identifies funding levels associated with differential returns. Full article

With the global trend towards “carbon neutrality,” the use of electric vehicles is becoming increasingly widespread, leading to new impacts on urban spaces. In the process of allocating resources for urban charging stations, there are widespread issues such as a singular planning approach and inadequate adaptation to actual travel demands. Therefore, this study adopts a method of integrating multi-source data to optimize the planning and layout of public electric vehicle charging facilities in Macau, striving to achieve breakthroughs in theoretical methods and key technologies. The study obtained a determination coefficient of R² = 0.43 through quantitative analysis, which is within a reasonable range of fitting spatial syntax and charging facility layout. This indicates that there is a moderate positive correlation between the distribution of charging facilities and core indicators such as road network integration and accessibility—about 43% of layout differences can be explained by spatial syntax indicators, and the remaining 57% of differences reserve space for optimizing multiple factors such as population density and parking lot distribution. On this basis, this study compares the layout experience of medium to high-density cities such as Hong Kong and Singapore, and combines the common characteristics of old parishes on Macau Island and new urban areas on outlying islands to explore innovative sustainable development technology paths that are suitable for Macau. This study not only summarizes the key factors and optimization breakthroughs that affect the spatial distribution of charging facilities in Macau, providing basic data and methodological strategies for charging facility planning, but also helps Macau save energy and reduce emissions, build a green city through layout optimization, provide practical reference for the development of land reclamation areas, and provide reference for carbon neutrality and smart city construction in the Guangdong Hong Kong Macau Greater Bay Area. Full article

Urban green space is essential for ecological functions, environmental quality, and human well-being, yet campus expansion can reduce vegetated areas. This study assessed UGS dynamics at Universitas Padjadjaran’s Jatinangor campus from 2015 to 2025 and evaluated an object-based machine learning approach for fine-scale land cover mapping. High-resolution WorldView-2, WorldView-3, and Legion-03 imagery were pan-sharpened, geometrically corrected, normalized, and used to compute NDVI and NDWI indices. Object-based image analysis segmented the imagery into homogeneous objects, followed by random forest classification into six land cover classes; UGS was derived from dense and sparse vegetation. Accuracy assessment included confusion matrices, overall accuracy 0.810–0.860, kappa coefficients 0.747–0.826, weighted F1 scores 0.807–0.860, and validation with 43 field points. The total UGS increased from 68.89% to 74.69%, bare land decreased from 13.49% to 5.81%, and building areas moderately increased from 10.36% to 11.52%. The maps captured vegetated and developed zones accurately, demonstrating the reliability of the classification approach. These findings indicate that campus expansion has been managed without compromising ecological integrity, providing spatially explicit, reliable data to inform sustainable campus planning and support green campus initiatives. Full article