Landscape and Urban Planning最新文献

Although research shows that individuals report higher levels of happiness when viewing green environments, the dose curve describing the impact of greenery on happiness remains undefined. Current literature only presents dose curves representing the associations between stress recovery and tree coverage, and does not explore how this fluctuates for different types of green infrastructure. Using an image-based randomised control trial with 401 participants, this study assesses the impact of levels and types of street greenery on people’s perceptions of happiness. Participants were randomly assigned to rate one of six images representing proportional increments of street greenery coverage (from 0% to 45%) across three greenery configurations – ground level, between buildings, and vertical (on building façades). The results suggest that the highest levels of perceived happiness are obtained from green coverage of between 35% and 45%, at which point the effect levels off. Vertical greenery coverage has a larger impact on perceived happiness than the other two tested configurations, and has a positive linear rather than concave relationship. The study indicates that viewing greater amounts of greenery significantly enhances communities’ perceived happiness, and shows that the relationship is dependent on the type of green infrastructure configuration used.

Numerous studies underscore the role of community gardens in sustaining food security, physical and mental health, and social networks during the COVID-19 pandemic, contributing to community resilience in different contexts of each country. Despite the rich history of urban gardening, Japan remains a geographical gap. This study conducted a mixed-method case study in suburban Tokyo and addresses the unique response of community gardeners to the pandemic within the Japanese context. The survey revealed that gardeners proactively established rules to navigate the crisis quickly through discussion and sustained their gardening activities. The findings also showed that their continuing activities helped the gardeners maintaining physical and mental health, and notably keeping their ikigai, sense of purpose in life in the unusual days. Thus, this study provided new evidence that community gardens may contribute to urban resilience, which indicates the significance of incorporating them into urban green space planning as a preparatory measure for future social crises.

This article focuses on the evolution of anthropogenic pressure across Czech large-scale protected areas (protected landscape areas and national parks, n = 30) over the last 60 years. In four periods (1960s; 1990; 2004; between 2016 and 2020) we analysed the development of artificial structures (built-up areas, recreational areas, roads, dirt roads, and streets) and their impact on landscape fragmentation. These spatial data were derived from topographic maps and aerial imageries and then statistically compared. Principally, built-up and recreational areas have increased; however, intensity varied across protected areas (PAs). Built-up areas have grown more in PAs close to large towns, especially after 1990 as protection did not prevent suburbanization in the PAs. Furthermore, PAs with more built-up areas also have more buildable areas; therefore, further ongoing development is expected. Recreational areas are present the most in some mountainous areas, such as ski resorts, and near large towns and spa towns (e.g. golf courses). The density of roads was more or less stable during the study period. Dirt road density differed within PAs according to the prevalent type of landscape: growth or stagnation in forested areas due to recreation and logging purposes and a decline in agricultural land, mainly as a consequence of collectivization in 1950 s followed by landscape unification and the creation of large patches of agricultural land. To sum up, anthropogenic pressure increased with landscape fragmentation, but these impacts are different across Czechia; in peripheral, attractive or peri-urban areas, which is important from landscape management point of view.

Vector cellular automata (VCA) models, which excel at representing spatiotemporal dynamics of irregularly shaped land parcels, have been widely employed in land use change simulations. However, current research faces the following issues: (1) most VCA models neglect the spatial heterogeneity of driving factors within each land parcel when evaluating the environmental driving effects; (2) when calculating the neighborhood effects, simple statistics of land use types in neighboring parcels are often used, overlooking the influence of driving factors within neighboring parcels; (3) the ability to explore the interactions between land parcels is often limited. To address the aforementioned issues, this study proposes a HashGAT-VCA model for investigating urban land use changes. The model utilizes a Hash function to encode the non-uniform distribution of each driving factor within each irregularly shaped land parcel into a fixed-length vector, and constructs a graph structure between land parcels based on their spatial topological relationships. By employing a Graph Attention Network (GAT), the model explores the mechanisms of environmental driving effects and inter-parcel interactions to calculate the probability of land use change for each parcel. The proposed HashGAT-VCA model was applied to simulate urban land use changes in Shenzhen, China, from 2009 to 2012. Compared to other VCA models, the HashGAT-VCA demonstrated higher simulation accuracy. The results indicated that HashGAT-VCA can effectively capture the impacts of the heterogeneously distributed driving factors and the interactions between land parcels on land use changes. Additionally, this study simulated land use patterns for the years 2025 and 2030 under ecological control strategies, providing decision support for urban planning.

Urban and forest trees provide valuable ecosystem services. However, they are increasingly threatened by invasive forest pests and pathogens. Trees in urban areas are often the first potential hosts non-native tree-feeding insects and tree pathogens (“pests”) encounter after introduction in a novel region. If the trees encountered are suitable hosts, these pests can establish and become invasive – eventually also in surrounding forests. Here, we compared tree species and genus composition between urban areas and surrounding forests and examined the implications for host availability for forest pests and potential effects on invasibility. We compiled and standardised 26 urban tree inventories, containing ∼ 500.000 individual trees. We used multivariate analyses to compare urban tree composition with forest tree composition from forests surrounding each municipality (10 km radius), derived from the Swiss National Forest Inventory. With > 1300 different tree species, species richness of urban trees was 17 times higher than species richness in surrounding forests. Linear models and multivariate analyses revealed that host availability for forest quarantine pests is significantly higher in urban areas than in forests, with large differences in host suitability for different quarantine pests between urban and forest tree assemblages. This indicates that differences in species composition in urban and forest trees can result in increased host availability, possibly facilitating the establishment of quarantine forest pests.

Existing research on urban dynamic simulations has primarily focused on horizontal aspects, whereas vertical changes have remained relatively unexplored. Although a few preliminary studies have attempted to simulate three-dimensional (3D) urban dynamics, these have generally amounted to rudimentary amalgamations of horizontal urban expansion simulation and vertical height estimation. In this study, we enhanced our original Future Land Use Simulation (FLUS) model into a 3D version (FLUS-3D) to simulate the continuous 3D dynamics of real-world urban development. A distinctive characteristic of the proposed model is its ability to concurrently update 3D information of the developed land grids during the simulation process. The FLUS-3D model was assessed via simulations across three metropolitan regions in China: the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei, Yangtze River Delta, and Pearl River Delta regions. Satisfactory simulation performances were found across all regions, with Figure of Merit values ranging 0.21–0.35 for horizontal expansion, overall accuracy values of 83 % for the refinement of urban functional types, and root mean squared error values of 5–7 m for built-up height simulations. Comparative experiments further demonstrated a significant outperformance of the FLUS-3D model compared to that of existing models. Subsequently, the proposed model was applied to simulate the future evolution of 3D urban dynamics until 2030 under the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs). The simulation results effectively illustrated the influence of each SSPs on 3D urban development. Given that 3D urban structures are fundamental parameters in urban climate modeling, the proposed model can potentially be used in urban-related studies climate change mitigation to achieve future urban sustainability.

Sexual crime is a critical global social problem. There remains a critical knowledge gap concerning whether and to what extent sexual crimes in public outdoor spaces can be influenced by landscape morphology of green spaces. This missing knowledge hinders the effective use of green spaces to reduce sexual crimes in these public settings. To address this issue, we collected a dataset comprising 5,155 cases of sexual crimes that occurred in public outdoor spaces in the United States from August 2021 to July 2022. A random forest model was employed to examine the statistical relationships between landscape morphology and sexual crimes. Additionally, we utilized the Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) model to quantify the interaction effects of landscape morphology with socioeconomic and demographic characteristics. This study yields three key findings: (1) Both the proportion and configuration factors of landscape morphology may significantly influence the sexual crime probability. (2) The relationships between landscape morphology and sexual crimes are nonlinear, and threshold values for the satisfactory dose and the preferred dose of green spaces can be identified. (3) There are significant interaction effects between landscape morphology with socioeconomic and demographic characteristics, emphasizing the importance of prioritizing green space interventions in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas. Lastly, through summarizing the findings of this study and previous research, we propose the Landscape-Sexual Crime Model (LSCM), which advocates for further research to explore effective strategies for using green spaces to reduce sexual crimes.

Urban expansion and sprawl lead to loss of green space. This has the potential to degrade natural capital and associated ecosystem services. Urban growth boundaries (UGBs) are a planning tool to delineate where growth may or may not occur as a strategy to protect green and open space. However, how these policies impact ecosystem services is unknown, particularly across multiple years. Here we compare pairs of cities: one of which has a UGB and one that does not. Specifically, we analyzed the following city pairs: (1) Lexington, KY: Huntsville, AL and (2) Portland, OR: Denver, CO. We modeled the ecosystem services provided to each city, quantifying carbon storage, pollinator abundance, urban flood risk, and urban cooling. Our results show that UGBs succeed in preserving the ecosystem services, over time, at a higher and more predictable rate than cities that do not have a UGB. Change over time highlights the effectiveness of UGBs in preserving ecosystem services overall and concentrating loss of ecosystem service delivery within highly urbanized areas. We discuss how the data necessitates analyzing spatial and temporal trends together to incorporate starting values of ecosystem service function for comparison between case studies. Natural capital and its associated ecosystem services should be key criteria for assessing policies for urban planning and used to further implement laws and policies to enhance environmental and human health within urban areas.

Urban green spaces are highly important for the health and well-being of urban residents, especially under conditions of ongoing climate change and urbanisation. However, vegetation in urban parks may also present a risk to human health through the presence of allergenic plants and release of allergy-inducing pollen. Using the city of Leipzig as a case study, we monitored pollen abundance in two inner city parks and on the roof of a central university hospital during the pollen season in 2021. We also conducted a questionnaire survey with 186 city residents. Questions related to their allergic symptoms, perceived physical and mental health impairment, potential behavioural adaptations due to expected pollen exposure, and suggestions for urban planning. We found nine plant genera with particularly high concentrations of pollen across the monitoring sites, including especially Alnus and Betula. While a high proportion of trees planted in one of the parks were Betula, potentially explaining the high concentrations we monitored, the high pollen load for Alnus could not be explained by the local presence of Alnus trees at either park. A majority of respondents (61%) indicated they suffered from pollen-related allergic symptoms, with Betula pollen most often mentioned as a main cause of their health impairment. Of respondents with symptoms, 82% indicated they did not change their park visitation patterns due to expected pollen exposure. However, nearly two-thirds of the respondents took allergy medication at least once per week. Participants’ recommendations for urban planning included considering allergies when selecting species for planting, improving urban air quality, and advancing public pollen information and warning systems. We conclude that particularly allergenic trees, such as Betula, should be avoided in densely populated urban areas, because of the potential for a large number of residents to experience allergy symptoms. However, such species should not be completely avoided, as plant diversity is still a crucial element of ecosystem resilience in the face of climate change and urbanisation. Combining objective and subjective data on the burden of allergenic pollen, as was done in our study, can help derive such targeted policy recommendations.

Walking and access to nature are two of the most effective health promotion and disease prevention strategies. There has been a growing interest in the dynamic pathways among access to nature, walking, and health. Effective measurement of these variables is the prerequisite to advancing our understanding of such pathways. However, contrasting to the rigorous methods available for walking and health measures, methods to quantify nature have been limited.

This study uses a systematic literature review to synthesize urban nature measures (UNMs) used in published studies linking urban nature with pedestrian health outcomes (e.g. walking, physical activity, physical health, mental health). A survey of experts (n = 30) was used to identify additional and emerging methods.

The literature search identified 115 articles and 48 UNMs most of which (40 or 83%) were objective measures. Results showed no consensus on the optimal UNMs for pedestrian health research, but certain measures such as NDVI, proximity to green spaces, and area/proportion of green spaces, were popularly used in previous studies. Experts suggested emerging methods including LiDAR, GPS, high-resolution imagery, virtual/augmented reality, and context-sensitive ecological momentary assessment. Major gaps in current UNMs included the shortage of eye-level and quality-related measures. While experts acknowledge the promise of emerging technologies, they shared concerns related to privacy, digital divide, confidentiality, and bias.

This study offers insights into the UNMs available to quantify nature for pedestrian health research, which can serve to facilitate future research, community actions, and policy changes aimed at promoting walking and nature access for healthier urban communities.