The interplay of land-use and land-ownership as a key for urban greening management

Abstract

Urban Green infrastructure (UGI) is strategic for developing sustainable cities to tackle tomorrow's challenges. The configuration of UGI influences the type and quality of ecosystem services provided to citizens and the efforts to have it well-maintained to guarantee its services. Under this premise, for developing UGI at all levels of city planning, it is crucial to understand how different factors like land use (LU) or ownership sectors (private, public) shape greenspaces' distribution and configuration. This analysis should account for structure as well as responsibilities. This study characterizes the UGI of Frankfurt am Main (Germany) by LU and land ownwership sectors using a detailed vegetation cover distinguishing between nominal height strata (grass, bush, tree). The UGI characterization was based on three landscape metrics: vegetation fraction, patch area and number of patches. The LUs’ characterization 1) reveals distinctive vegetation structure between the LUs, 2) allows identifying green spatial arrangements with possibilities to enhance its ecosystem services (e.g. connected domestic gardens), and 3) highlights trees as the dominant vegetation strata. The ownership indicates that: 1) private sector constitutes a high percentage of the urban vegetation cover (40 %), 2) LUs are mainly associated to single ownership sector and 3) there are differences in the vegetation percentages between the private and public sectors for same LUs. These findings support discussing ecosystem services, maintenance efforts, target groups and planning opportunities. Thus, this study demonstrates the potential of an integral analysis, considering both function and ownership, for several aspects of urban planning.