Landscape and Urban Planning最新文献

Local government is at the forefront of providing communities with urban greenspace, amidst responding to global challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss and population growth. Much research has focused on the demands for more urban greenspace; far less has examined issues concerning supply. Better understanding of the dilemmas faced by those charged with the task of providing urban greenspace at the city scale can help policymakers, planners, and aligned professions ensure that municipal resources are appropriately and justly allocated. We aim to address this gap, answering two research questions: 1) what factors shape urban greenspace provision, and 2) how do these factors manifest differently for municipalities of Australia and New Zealand? We surveyed 82 local government officers/officials from mid-size municipalities of nine Anglophone countries about their experience providing municipal greenspace. We expose some of the experiences, challenges, and emerging issues facing contemporary municipal greenspace providers globally, including the drivers and barriers to urban greenspace provision. Findings reveal the complexities of supplying urban greenspace, shaped by multiple factors. While funding, community expectations, and governance tools, are the main factors, funding is the main barrier to providing urban greenspace globally. Moreover, almost all other factors affect availability of sufficient funding. Key differences for Australia and New Zealand reveal a broadening conceptualisation of the purpose of parks: more so multi-purpose than primarily sport and recreation. Revealing challenges greenspace managers face in delivering adequate urban greenspace and facilities, these findings question the efficacy of the current planning approaches embedded in planning legislation, municipal greenspace plans and strategies.

Urban forest management plans (UFMPs) are a key element of the planning process in urban forestry. While we can learn about management intentions by analyzing the content of UFMPs, less is known about happens after plan implementation has begun. This study fills this gap by exploring how is UFMP implementation advancing. To do this we asked municipal urban forest professionals working in Canadian municipalities with a UFMP to answer an online survey. The survey: 1) characterized UFMP development; 2) assessed the level of achievement of UFMP objectives; 3) assessed which municipal characteristics led to UFMP objective achievement; and 4) assessed professional views on the outcomes of having a UFMP. Based on n = 118 responses across Canada, we found that UFMPs have been published frequently in the last 20 years, with a peak during the period 2010–2014. On average, and as shared by the respondents, the level of achievement of UFMP objectives was over 50 %, indicating good progress in UFMP implementation. We found no statistically significant differences in the level of UFMP objective achievement by type of city or language of community (English/French), among other factors. There was a consensus among professionals that increasing financial resources for urban forests was an expected outcome of having an UFMP, although there were also diverse and complementary views about the outcome of a UFMPs. A key finding was that climate change objectives are not being implemented or included in UFMPs at high levels. While focused on Canadian cities, this study also provides guidelines on how to assess UFMP implementation across case studies, as well as insights regarding the management objectives that are being overlooked in plan implementation. This may enable future work by researchers and practitioners working in fields related to nature-based solutions, green infrastructure, urban climate adaptation, and sustainable cities worldwide.

Protecting and enhancing biodiversity in urban areas is critical for meeting international conservation commitments, and has a vital role to play in the health and wellbeing of city residents. Yet, urbanisation can have devastating impacts on biodiversity, with urban development typically delivering landscapes in which habitat remains only as small, fragmented patches, surrounded by an inhospitable urban matrix. As cities begin to plan for urban biodiversity alongside other land use considerations, planners can leverage ecological knowledge and conservation planning concepts to aid decision making to deliver benefits for nature and people. Here we demonstrate how targeted green infrastructure placement can potentially increase the delivery of landscape level benefits for biodiversity by improving connectivity for native species. We measure the change in ecological connectivity when parking spaces are converted to small green spaces across the City of Melbourne, Australia. We test three reallocation scenarios with varying levels of parking space conversion to green infrastructure and varying levels of spatial prioritisation to ecological connectivity. While the scenario that maximised the number of parking spaces converted performed best, we show that targeted greening delivered the strongest connectivity outcomes per unit of area converted. Improvements in connectivity were two times higher per unit effort when conversion was targeted towards locations identified as potentially important barriers to landscape-level movement. Our research emphasises the advantage of strategically targeted green infrastructure investment to support urban biodiversity.

Urban forests are a critical element of urban environmental planning. Greater awareness of the ecosystem services provided by urban forests over the last two decades has led to an increased interest in improving urban forest management. In Canada, the conditions of management are usually articulated by a municipal government in an urban forest management plan (UFMP). This study responds to previous studies on the content of Canadian UFMPs to provide a more comprehensive and updated comparison of UFMPs across Canada. While previous research has examined the content of UFMPs at a moment in time, and often when far fewer plans existed, in this study we consider changes in content over time and the influence of the social-ecological characteristics of municipalities on this content. We combined quantitative and qualitative content analyses, including topic modelling text analysis algorithms and interpretative thematic coding, to extract content, in the form of topics or themes, from 74 UFMPs. We assessed the distribution of these topics and themes by year of publication, and the influence of social-ecological characteristics upon this distribution using standard correlation and means differences analysis procedures. We found that Canadian UFMPs contain a broad number of themes and topics but are dominated by ideas referring to increasing tree abundance. Comparatively less attention is being paid to climate change and community stewardship. Mentions of increasing tree abundance and climate change rose over time. There was also a greater mention of administration, community education, and increasing tree abundance in smaller municipalities. Canadian municipalities may be well positioned to increase the abundance of urban forests given current management conditions. While abundance itself is beneficial, increasing abundance without addressing issues related to biodiversity, vulnerability of urban forests to climate change, and community stewardship, is a management trade-off that could, for example, increase abundance in the short term, but increase vulnerability in the long term. While focused on Canadian cities, this study also provides guidelines for possible cross-country comparisons and reflections on how UFMPs can be powerful management and planning tools for a climate-resilient and sustainable future.

Schools offer prospects to enhance adolescent health by encouraging physical activity. This study contributes to the understanding of adolescent health research, drawing on data from physical fitness and mental health surveys conducted in 2015. The participants included 8,967 seventh-grade students across 45 junior high schools in Dalian, China. By employing multilevel analytical models, this research explores the effects of both the school environment and school neighbourhood environment on adolescents’ body mass index (BMI), physical fitness (PF), and mental health (MH). Additionally, we delve into how physical activities (PA) affect these relationships through stepwise regression analysis. The findings indicate that the school setting significantly affects adolescents’ health outcomes. Specifically, BMI is positively correlated with distance to the nearest amusement park. Conversely, it negatively relates to the extent of school green space and playground, the diversity of land use, and sidewalk density. In terms of PF, positive associations were observed with land use mix and the normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI). However, PF demonstrates negative associations with distance to the nearest parks and beaches. Concerning MH, there is a positive relationship with the proportion of playground, land use mix, sidewalk density, NDVI, and the green view index (GVI). On the contrary, MH is negatively correlated with the distance to park, amusement park, and beach. PA, as an intermediary factor, moderates the relationship between the school environment and both adolescent PF and MH, with mediation effects of 3.713% and 25.193%, respectively. These insights offer valuable theoretical guidance for designing health-promoting schools and urban planning strategies.

Nature-based solutions (NBS) can play a critical role in sustainability transitions in both urban and rural areas, but their uptake is hindered by a wide variety of barriers. While networks have been identified as a support structure for mainstreaming NBS, it is unclear what specific roles networks play in addressing the multiple barriers that NBS mainstreaming faces. Through qualitative research using focus group meetings and semi-structured interviews within two sectors in the Netherlands where attempts towards a nature-based transition are observed – i.e., agriculture and construction – we identify seven different functions through which networks address six specific barrier categories. We find broad network functions (e.g., knowledge sharing) that address multiple types of barriers simultaneously and targeted network functions (e.g., lobbying towards policy makers) aimed at alleviating one specific type of barrier. We also document that networks leave certain barriers unaddressed, such as technological and political barriers in the construction sector and social barriers in both sectors. Our results contribute to a more in-depth understanding of network function – barrier combinations for nature-based sustainability transitions, both in an urban and a rural context, which can help networks to further strategize and allocate their resources.

Given that green space patterns and population density often show opposing trends over space, this could lead to trade-off (distance/population decay) relationships. Consequently, this paper utilized the Study on Global Ageing and Adult Health (SAGE) data from Shanghai, China, to investigate whether there is a spatial trade-off in the health effects of green spaces on people’s inactivity. Our findings confirmed the trade-off effects of green spaces in reducing sedentary time, using interaction terms to highlight how the health impacts of green spaces vary across different population densities and may thus lead to inconsistent relationships between green space and health outcomes. Generally, the ability of green spaces to affect sedentary time decreased as population density increases, particularly regarding park proximity and the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). Our research also revealed that the trade-off in health benefits from green spaces was influenced by the type of green space. For instance, park proximity, park area, and NDVI showed trade-off effects, with higher population densities enhancing the impact of NDVI on increasing sedentary time (β = 133.871), despite NDVI itself decreasing with a rise in population density (r = -0.68). Conversely, the Green Vegetation Index (GVI) did not demonstrate such an effect. The unequal spatial distribution and composition of green space may further exacerbate health inequities. Therefore, this paper recommends that future provisioning of green spaces should take into account the local urban spatial structure.

The restoration of urban sealed soils is a major stake for urban planners. In particular, characterizing their resilience from a biotic perspective is of primary importance for remobilizing these artificialized substrates in urban green spaces. Using Marseille (France) as a case study, we implemented a metabarcoding next generation sequencing approach to characterize the diversity and the composition of ectomycorrhizal (EM) fungal communities present in soils sealed for 60 years. Based on an inoculation experiment, we tested the ability of the remaining spore bank to establish EM interactions with plants. Altogether, we aimed at assessing the potential of peri-urban natural habitats to provide an efficient soil EM inoculum for the restoration of urban soils. We found that: (i) long-term sealing drastically reduced the diversity of EM fungi in urban soils, (ii) long-leaved spores of hypogeous gastroid fungi were efficient to establish EM symbioses with plants, and (iii) the efficiency of EM fungal inoculation depended on the natural habitat used as an inoculum source. Oak forests provided species-rich but poorly efficient inoculum. Contrastingly, soils collected in disturbed shrublands (garrigues) hosted moderately-rich EM communities containing droughtadapted species with high ability to colonize urban soils. Our findings highlight that peri-urban landscapes are promising candidates to feed local systems of urban soil restoration. In this perspective, poorly-considered habitats such as shrublands can be considered as valuable sources of soil biota to prevent the over-exploitation of agricultural areas.