Search Results (965)

Nature-based solutions (NBSs) are central to urban climate-neutrality strategies, but their implementation still lags behind policy ambition. One reason is that most NBS benefits are public goods and rarely generate direct revenue, so we know far less about the institutional and financial conditions needed to deliver them than about their ecological performance. This paper develops a business model framework linking NBS interventions to financing and governance configurations, applying established NBS typologies and the Pestoff Triangle of state, market, and community provision to thirteen interventions across eleven sites in the Railway District of Thessaloniki, Greece. The interventions are organised into five business model categories: public space greening, private space upgrades, public–private hybrids, building retrofits, and renewable energy. Their financing logic is shaped less by intervention type than by ownership structure and stakeholder configuration. To address this gap, we followed category-specific blended finance strategies combining grants, private investment, regulatory incentives, and community resources, underpinned by stewardship-oriented governance. The findings suggest that scaling NBSs depends less on technical readiness than on institutional capacity to match financing and governance to local ownership and stakeholder contexts, offering a pathway from climate-neutrality strategy to implementable urban regeneration. Full article

Fine-scale site selection of urban parks serves as a core measure to guarantee spatial equity of public service spaces for residents and advance the sustainable development of urban ecological spaces. Among relevant tasks, balancing the supply and demand of green spaces stands out as an essential foundation for maintaining long-term stability of urban human well-being and ecosystems. Green-space supply is defined as the stock of various existing urban parks within the city, while green-space demand is quantified via grids generated based on residential communities in Changsha. Existing research on urban park site selection lacks a full-process coupled framework, fails to accommodate differentiated layout demands for multi-level parks, and struggles to reconcile the sustainable operation and long-term ecological empowerment of urban green-space systems. Taking the main urban area of Changsha as the research scope, this study divides the study area into grid units to analyze the spatial differentiation of green-space accessibility and identify service blind zones. The XGBoost model is adopted to predict areas suitable for green-space construction, and the NSGA-III algorithm is applied to realize collaborative multi-objective optimization covering service efficiency, ecological benefits, and land development costs. The results reveal that the 15-min walking coverage of community parks in central Changsha only reaches 57.29%. Respectively, 34.52% and 41.04% of residential communities record accessibility levels below the municipal average of urban parks and forest parks, with prominent shortages of green-space supply in peripheral urban areas. This study optimizes and screens twenty-eight candidate sites for community parks, twelve candidate sites for urban parks, and eight candidate sites for forest parks. The proposed scheme effectively narrows the gap in green-space accessibility across the whole city and coordinates ecological conservation with land development costs. Compared with research relying on a single model or two-stage coupling frameworks, this paper constructs a systematic workflow spanning supply–demand status assessment to multi-objective layout decision-making, enabling differentiated optimized layout of multi-tiered parks. The integrated framework effectively enhances the spatial resilience and resource utilization efficiency of urban green-space systems, facilitates high-quality and sustainable upgrading of urban living environments, and provides a referable innovative approach for multi-level urban park arrangement and refined multi-objective planning. Full article

Urban green space (UGS) service mismatch is a key public space issue that needs to be addressed in the renewal of built-up urban areas. Existing studies have mostly evaluated UGS service levels from the perspective of green space supply or accessibility, but have paid insufficient attention to the mismatch among population demand, UGS supply, and UGS accessibility, as well as the built environment contexts associated with different mismatch types. Taking the urban core of Shenyang as a case study, this study constructs a UGS service mismatch typology and combines non-UGS built environment indicators, XGBoost, and SHAP to identify the spatial characteristics and nonlinear model-based associations of different mismatch types. The results indicate the following: (1) UGS service problems in the urban core of Shenyang can be divided into five types. Priority Improvement Area, Potential Activation Area, and Resource-rich Area together account for 56.05% of the study area, indicating that the mismatch among demand, resources, and accessibility has a high spatial coverage. (2) Different mismatch types correspond to differentiated built environment profiles. Priority Improvement Area co-occurs with service shortage, weak functional concentration, low development intensity, and weak transit support. Potential Activation Area has relatively good functional and transport foundations, but its UGS service transformation remains insufficient. (3) SHAP results show that public transit proximity, functional concentration, and building form are key indicators associated with model-based type differentiation. The contributions of mean building floor and POI density to Priority Improvement Area decline after exceeding their breakpoints, indicating that, within the model, this type is more likely to occur in areas with insufficient development intensity and functional concentration. By integrating the demand–supply–accessibility relationship, UGS service mismatch typology, and built environment characterization, this study provides a more spatially targeted analytical framework for UGS service diagnosis in built-up urban areas, and supports the shift from uniform green space provision to type-specific service optimization. Full article

In response to the growing demand for sustainable regeneration and efficient operation of urban spaces, the adoption of digitalised facility management (FM) has emerged as an effective strategy. FM facilitates data-driven planning and optimised resource use, contributing to more sustainable and resilient urban environments. This research combines Building Information Modelling (BIM) with Visual Programming Languages (VPLs) to support the regeneration and optimisation of an urban park. Autodesk Revit is employed to develop an LOD 300 semantic and geometric model, while Dynamo enables the implementation of two parametric scripts: Script A, governing on/off control of monitored systems based on environmental, temporal and contextual conditions, and Script B, providing continuous operational monitoring, fault diagnosis and color-coded visual feedback directly within the BIM environment. The framework is tested at Parco Gioeni, an 8.6-hectare historically and geologically urban park in Italy, across three management systems: irrigation, nebulization and green area monitoring. A total of 28 what-if scenarios are conducted across systems, indicating the framework’s functional consistency and contextual adaptability under the tested conditions. The proposed approach is built on accessible open software tools, making it transferable to public administration contexts, and is designed to be scalable and replicable across different urban green space typologies. Full article

Public spaces are essential for urban well-being, social interaction, environmental quality, and territorial equity; however, their presence does not necessarily ensure adequate quality, accessibility, or multifunctionality. Although previous research has emphasized the importance of green and public spaces, fewer studies have integrated multidimensional quality assessment, GIS-based spatial analysis, and multicriteria prioritization in intermediate Latin American cities. This study aimed to evaluate spatial inequalities in the quality of urban public spaces in Loja, Ecuador, through a GIS-based multi-attribute composite index. A total of 183 public spaces were assessed using structured field observation of observable conditions and organized into six dimensions: functional, environmental, cultural, recreational, safety, and economic. The data were cleaned, validated, integrated with spatial layers, and analyzed through descriptive, inferential, multivariate, spatial autocorrelation, and multicriteria procedures. The results showed that public space quality was mainly concentrated at low and medium levels, with functional and safety dimensions playing a stronger role in the global index, while cultural, recreational, and economic components showed weaker performance. Spatial analysis revealed significant territorial differences, local clusters, and spatial outliers. The proposed framework provides a replicable tool to diagnose observable public space quality, identify priority intervention areas, and support evidence-based urban planning in other intermediate cities. Full article

High-resolution remote sensing imagery provides valuable data support for accurate binary urban green space extraction. However, due to complex urban backgrounds, existing methods still face challenges in accurately delineating green space boundaries and preserving fine-scale spatial details. To address these issues, this study proposes a novel network, termed Hierarchical Gated Residual Fusion and High-Frequency Guided Deformable Upsampler Network (HGRHDNet), for boundary-enhanced urban green space segmentation. The proposed framework adopts ConvNeXt-L as the encoder backbone and incorporates a Hierarchical Gated Residual Fusion Decoder (HGRFD) to adaptively fuse multi-scale features through dynamic weighting and residual feature propagation. In addition, a High-Frequency Guided Deformable Upsampler (HFGDU) is introduced to enhance high-frequency detail reconstruction and cross-resolution feature alignment, thereby improving boundary localization accuracy. The proposed method was evaluated on three public datasets with different spatial resolutions and spectral characteristics, including WHDLD, UGS-1m, and UBGG. Experimental results show that HGRHDNet achieves Boundary Intersection over Union (BIoU) values of 43.82%, 18.22%, and 64.55% on the three datasets, respectively, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art methods. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses demonstrate that HGRHDNet effectively preserves narrow gaps between adjacent green spaces, elongated vegetation structures, and fragmented green space patches while reducing boundary ambiguity in complex urban environments. These results indicate that HGRHDNet provides a robust and effective solution for high-resolution urban green space extraction and has considerable potential for applications in urban ecological assessment, green space inventory, and sustainable urban planning. Full article

The purpose of this research is to propose a sustainable urban support regeneration system aimed at recovering the historic urban landscape of Rimac, Lima (2024). The Historic Center of Rimac is currently undervalued due to several issues affecting the district, including citizen insecurity, the limited percentage of green areas, excessive and unplanned urban growth, the abandonment of the district’s historic centers, and its disconnection from the surrounding urban environment. The methodology was developed through a review of bibliographic documents, such as scientific publications, together with the use of 2D and 3D software tools, which enabled the collection of environmental, cultural, physical–spatial, and urban information. The implementation of sustainable public spaces within the historic urban landscape of Rimac will transform the area into an attractive tourist and cultural destination. The viewpoints will provide panoramic views, the urban forests will improve air quality and increase green areas, and the site museum will preserve and disseminate the rich local history. Together, these interventions will promote urban regeneration, community wellbeing, and the sustainable development of the area, thereby offering an efficient proposal aimed at optimizing the district’s potential and implementing strategies that contribute to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Full article

Environmental injustices in the United States are rooted in structural racism, particularly policies of racial segregation and disinvestment such as redlining that have produced enduring inequalities in the built environment and population health. This concept paper examines extreme heat as a racialized environmental exposure in Buffalo, New York—a post-industrial Great Lakes city increasingly framed as a “climate haven”. While such designations suggest relative protection from climate risk, they obscure the socio-spatial inequalities that shape uneven vulnerability on the ground. Drawing on a structural racism framework and insights from urban political economy, this study argues that extreme heat vulnerability in Buffalo is not incidental but produced through historically embedded patterns of disinvestment in housing, infrastructure, and environmental resources. Neighborhoods such as the East Side, Black Rock, and the West Side exhibit heightened exposure due to concentrations of thermally inefficient housing, limited tree canopy and green space, and unequal access to cooling resources. These conditions reflect the material legacy of segregation and uneven urban development, which continue to structure differential capacity to adapt to rising temperatures. Although extreme heat is widely recognized as a major public health threat, it remains underexamined in mid-sized northern and Rust Belt cities, where risk is often perceived as episodic rather than structurally produced. This paper addresses this gap by advancing a conceptual critique of the “climate haven” narrative, demonstrating that relative geographic advantage does not equate to equitable resilience. By theorizing extreme heat as a mechanism through which structural racism is reproduced, this study highlights the need for place-based, justice-oriented climate adaptation strategies that confront the historical and institutional drivers of vulnerability in Great Lakes cities. Full article

Urban trees are important biological carbon pools in cities, yet their standing carbon stocks and the associated methodological uncertainty regarding their evaluation often vary among functional spaces. This study assessed 2442 individual trees representing 148 species in 116 standard 20 m × 20 m plots in the core urbanized area of Qingdao, China. Individual-tree carbon stocks were estimated from diameter at breast height, tree height, wood basic density, and allometric equations and were analyzed across urban functional units (UFUs), DBH classes, and species. Under the baseline Chave model, the sampled trees stored 153.337 Mg C, equivalent to 562.237 Mg CO₂, with a mean carbon density of 33.047 Mg C ha⁻¹. Residential districts contributed the highest total carbon stock, whereas public affairs service districts had the highest carbon density. Trees with DBH ≥ 40 cm accounted for only 3.93% of individuals but contributed 29.50% of the total carbon stock, and the top 20 species contributed approximately 79.0%. Alternative China-specific equations increased total estimates by 9.38–11.24% but covered only 10 of 148 species and 21.38% of trees at most; the UFU ranking and the main size- and species-contribution patterns remained unchanged. A root-to-shoot parameter sensitivity analysis likewise affected absolute estimates but not relative patterns. These findings support conserving mature trees, maintaining medium-sized trees as future carbon reserves, and targeting greening improvements to low-carbon-density functional spaces while recognizing the uncertainty inherent in absolute carbon-stock estimates. Full article

Urban parks provide key ecosystem services and support everyday recreation, but their multifunctional use often creates mismatches between planned functions and diverse public demands. Taking Chaoyang Park in Beijing as the study area, this study applied Public Participation Geographic Information Systems (PPGISs) to map landscape values and identify recreation conflicts. Boundary-based and inductive social landscape metrics were used to analyze the spatial patterns of six landscape values: aesthetic value, ecological value, recreational value, cultural value, healing value and economic value. Kernel density analysis was further used to identify recreation conflict hotspots and examine their spatial association with landscape value agglomeration. The results show that the landscape values in Chaoyang Park are characterized by multi-value agglomeration in core areas and functional differentiation in peripheral areas. Aesthetic value, recreational value and ecological value are the dominant value types, and their spatial distribution is highly consistent with the planning orientations of functional areas. Recreation conflicts are mainly manifested as activity disturbances and space contention, and are jointly associated with overlapping spatial functions, divergent activity characteristics and unbalanced facility allocation. This study demonstrates that PPGISs can support refined management and recreation conflict regulation in large urban parks, providing evidence for public participation planning and sustainable management of urban green spaces in high-density cities. Full article

Public pedestrian pathways have been widely adopted in planned cities to improve walkability and strengthen connections between residential areas and public spaces. However, existing studies have largely focused on management issues and post-occupancy privatization, with limited attention given to how these pathways evolve throughout the planning and development process. This study investigates the evolution of public pedestrian pathways in Sejong City, Korea, a state-led planned city developed through a phased planning system. Based on district unit plans, design competition guidelines, detailed design documents, as-built drawings, aerial imagery, and field verification of implemented conditions, the study analyzes the changing planning objectives, spatial characteristics, and functional roles of public pedestrian pathways across five planning generations. The results reveal three major trends. First, public pedestrian pathways evolved from lot-level circulation routes into integral components of neighborhood- and city-scale pedestrian networks linking parks, green corridors, schools, and community facilities. Second, planning approaches were continuously refined through district unit planning, housing design competitions, and implementation experience, leading to increasingly integrated and strategic spatial configurations. Third, the growing integration of public pedestrian pathways with community facilities, public open spaces, and green infrastructure transformed them from simple movement corridors into semi-public infrastructure intended to support social interaction and everyday community life. The findings suggest that public pedestrian pathways function not merely as circulation facilities but as planning mechanisms that enhance urban openness, connectivity, publicness, and community integration. The study demonstrates how public pedestrian pathways can evolve into semi-public infrastructure through the cumulative refinement of planning across successive planning generations and provides planning implications for future pedestrian-oriented urban development. Full article

Regular physical activity (PA) is essential for healthy aging. For older adults residing in urban areas, access to urban green space (UGS) can help increase PA levels. This systematic review examined the association between availability, accessibility, and attractiveness of the UGS on PA among older adults. PubMed, CINAHL, and Web of Science were searched for articles published 2016–2024 that used quantitative methods to explore associations between the qualities of UGS and measures of PA in this demographic. Findings from nine studies from Europe, China, Hong Kong, and Australia were synthesized by availability, accessibility, and attractiveness domains. For availability, the presence and size of UGS were positively associated with older adults’ PA in several studies, whereas UGS proximity was inconsistently associated with PA. For accessibility, infrastructure-related features such as trail length were positively associated with PA, but findings for park features and safety were mixed. Results were also inconsistent for attractiveness; some land-cover and amenity features showed positive associations, while others showed no clear relationship with PA. In addition to variability in associations, there was great heterogeneity across studies in age inclusion criteria (e.g., 45+ vs. 65+), participant inclusion criteria, setting, operationalization of UGS quality, PA measures, and study rigor, reducing the ability to draw conclusions about the association between UGS qualities and PA. Although findings can begin to inform urban planners, public health professionals, and policymakers in designing UGS to promote PA in older adults, the field would benefit from more consistent definitions and measures of UGS qualities and PA. Full article

In land-scarce urban regeneration, small public green spaces (SPGSs) are increasingly used to improve everyday green-space access. However, their contribution to spatial provision equity in urban regeneration depends not only on how many small green spaces are built, but also on whether they compensate communities with greater spatial relief needs. Taking Shenzhen, China, as a case, this study develops a community-scale need–provision matching framework to evaluate the compensatory performance of 537 post-2016 SPGSs across 582 valid residential communities. Spatial relief needs were measured using a composite Spatial Relief Need Index (SRNI) based on traditional park deficiency, built-up intensity, and residential land concentration; the analysis therefore addresses spatial provision equity rather than broader social equity. SPGS provision was measured by distinguishing network-accessible SPGSs, evaluated through pedestrian-network accessibility, from residential-embedded SPGSs, evaluated as internal residential green-space supplementation. Communities were then classified into four compensation typologies: effective compensation, compensation failure, potential amplification (a diagnostic low-need–high-provision category), and low need–low provision. The results show that SPGS provision in Shenzhen is spatially fragmented and does not consistently align with high-need communities. Effective compensation occurred in 128 communities, while 163 high-need communities remained underprovided, and 163 lower-need communities received relatively high provision. Compensation failure and potential amplification together accounted for 56.0% of valid residential communities, exceeding the 50.0% random-label expectation (two-sided permutation p = 0.005), although the association was small (|φ| = 0.120). The traditional park deficit-supplementation and need-oriented compensation indicators yielded 58.8% and 44.0%, respectively; because their definitions and thresholds differ, this contrast is descriptive rather than a direct scale-effect estimate. The findings indicate that SPGS policy should move beyond project counts and coverage expansion toward community-scale, need-oriented allocation so that incremental greening can better support spatially responsive and sustainable urban regeneration. Full article

Urban grey infrastructure, including transport corridors, flood-control systems, drainage facilities, railway margins, and industrial brownfields, is often treated in conventional planning as functionally vacant or ecologically marginal space. In this study, grey infrastructure is defined as engineered or infrastructure-dominated urban spaces and their residual or edge landscapes, rather than as green infrastructure. Yet such spaces may still contain spontaneous vegetation, water edges, soil patches, and sheltered microhabitats that can support birds, insects, small mammals, and other urban species in highly urbanized environments. From a multispecies justice perspective, this study examines spatial mismatches between PPGIS-derived public recognition and habitat quality modeled using the Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST) model in urban grey infrastructure. Using Zhanggong District, Ganzhou, China, as a case study, we developed an integrated framework that combines public participation geographic information systems (PPGIS), grid-based public recognition mapping, and the InVEST Habitat Quality model. Based on 260 valid questionnaires, participants identified locations associated with aesthetic preference and perceived habitat potential. These mapped perception points were converted into a grid-based public recognition indicator and compared with modeled habitat quality. The results indicate a marked perception-habitat mismatch. High public recognition was frequently associated with visually ordered, accessible, and highly managed urban spaces, whereas high modeled habitat quality was more strongly related to vegetated, riverine, peripheral, and semi-natural spaces. The spatial classification shows that aesthetic mismatch areas, where public recognition was high but modeled habitat quality was low, covered 43.20 km², accounting for 7.16% of the study area, whereas hidden ecological value areas, where modeled habitat quality was high but public recognition was low, covered 118.21 km², accounting for 19.59%. This study provides a replicable framework for identifying perception–habitat mismatches and supports more ecologically informed and inclusive strategies for regenerating urban grey infrastructure. More specifically, the study extends an established perception-ecology debate to grey infrastructure and residual urban spaces and demonstrates how PPGIS-derived public recognition and InVEST-modeled habitat quality can be compared within the same grid framework to locate spatially explicit alignment and mismatch. Full article

Copenhagen is often regarded as a pioneer city in climate change adaptation and green–blue infrastructure deployment. However, when addressing extreme environmental problems such as heavy rainfall flooding and urban heat island effects, many interventions remain site-specific and insufficiently connected across spatial scales. This article investigates how Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) can be structured as an integrated spatial infrastructure system to enhance climate resilience and urban livability in Copenhagen. The research combines theoretical analysis, comparative project studies, GIS-based spatial analysis, and a multi-criteria evaluation matrix. Building on this method, a multi-scalar framework for NBS interventions is developed, which consists of site prioritization at the Meso scale, development strategies at the Micro scale, and NBS spatial design at the Nano scale. With the assessment criteria adapted from the UNalab project Nature-Based Solutions Technical Handbook Factsheets, the results demonstrate that Nano-scale design strategy can enhance green connectivity, create new inclusive urban public spaces, transform existing industrial areas, and improve new streets and parks for climate resilience. The Meso-scale distributed measures deliver localized benefits such as infiltration and flood buffering, while the most effective strategies integrate cross-scalar NBS interventions within a connected network. The case of Nordhavn is analyzed through multi-criteria selection and multifunctionality assessment as a qualitative process for a better demonstration of the practical application of NBS prioritization and spatial design analysis. Full article