Landscape and Urban Planning最新文献

Urban natural spaces with high wildness degrees could harbor greater biodiversity and provide more experiences of nature for urbanites than green–blue spaces that are perfectly manicured and regularly maintained. Existing empirical studies have suggested that people tend to prefer moderately wild landscapes. However, urbanites’ preferences for varying wildness degrees of urban landscapes have rarely been studied in developing countries with fast-growing cities. Using a photograph-based survey, this study compared citizens’ preferences for an urban wildness gradient of urban lakeshores between developed (Tours, France) and developing (Wuhan, China) contexts. In Tours and Wuhan, respectively, 120 and 295 questionnaires were collected, focusing on lakeshore visitors only. Bootstrapping and thematic analysis of the survey responses affirmed that urban lakeshores with medium-degree wildness are consistently preferred across developed and developing contexts, a result that can be attributed to the perceived balance between landscape coherence/legibility and complexity/mystery. Moreover, some respondents (25.8 % from Tours and 32.6 % from Wuhan) showed a strong preference for complex and unstructured lakeshore landscapes with high wildness for different reasons. In Tours, respondents’ preference for high wildness degree was associated with more frequent visits to lakeshore areas. In Wuhan, a similar preference was associated with increasing age. While increasing the wildness of urban lakeshores from low to medium could adequately meet public preferences, attracting more frequent visits and helping younger residents to appreciate urban wildness should be considered for successfully restoring/enriching biodiversity and mobilizing public support for wild urban landscapes.

Exposure to greenspaces has well-established benefits for the health and well-being of urban dwellers. Among these greenspaces, peri-urban parks (PUPs), which are human-modified, large-scale, and public-accessible greenspaces located on the urban fringe, have received increasing attention from policymakers and researchers in recent years, as the limited provision of greenspaces in urban areas barely meet the residents’ needs for nature engagement. However, the associations between PUPs and life expectancy and their potential socioeconomic inequalities remain unclear. In this study, we employed a longitudinal, territory-wide death-registration dataset to address such research gaps. The results showed that both the area and greenery of PUP significantly decreased life expectancy loss with standardized coefficients of −0.156 (p = 0.001) and −0.173 (p < 0.001), respectively. The life-expectancy benefits of PUP greenery remain significant throughout 200–8000 m buffer radii. Nevertheless, socioeconomic inequalities were found between PUPs and life expectancy associations. We found that people with higher socioeconomic status (SES) received higher PUP exposure. In addition, contrary to the hypothesis of equigenesis theory, higher-SES populations received greater benefits in life expectancy than lower-SES populations, even after controlling for inequalities in PUP exposure. Our findings uncover a complex relationship between PUPs, life expectancy, and SES, highlighting the need for targeted interventions for people with different SES to ensure equitable health benefits for all.

Green infrastructure (GI) has developed as a sustainable approach to the mitigation of urban floods. While machine learning (ML) models have exhibited advantages in urban flood simulation, their direct application to support the quantitative planning of GI at the city scale remains a challenge. To address this, an interpretable ML model based on support vector machine (SVM) and the Shapley additive explanations (SHAP) approach is integrated with the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm-II (NSGA-II) in this study. The model is applied to the case of central Beijing, China, and demonstrates a robust performance with a high area under curve (AUC) value of 0.94. The results of the urban flood susceptibility assessment identify the urban-rural transition zone in the study area as being under a greater flood threat. Via model interpretation with SHAP, the dominant roles of GI and grey infrastructure (GrI) in preventing flood are revealed and the non-linear complementarity between the two is demonstrated to be more significant in study units with a GI proportion of less than 0.45. Supported by the NSGA-II-based optimization framework, optimal GI plans under different total implementations of GI are achieved, among which a solution with a 3.21% increase in the total GI area is selected as that with the best investment efficiency. The pattern of GI implementation is suggested to be dispersed and small-scale by model. This study provides a tool with broad application prospects, effectively integrating GI implementation with urban planning. The findings of this study not only provide important references for the determination of the priority areas of new ecological space in Beijing, but also provide areas that share similar characteristics with new insight into GI planning and the management of urban floods.

Childhood nature experiences have been identified as critical factors of Nature Relatedness (NR) at the individual level. This exploratory study delved into the distinct contribution of different forms of childhood experiences to NR in early adulthood, focusing on the living environment and actual contact with nature, along with nature education and the influence of people around. NR scores and self-reported experiences of Chinese college students (n = 431) were collected using a questionnaire survey. Objective environmental indicators (normalized difference vegetation index, land cover, and nighttime light) in 13 buffers of different sizes were adopted to precisely depict their historical living environments. Based on the results of bivariate correlations and hierarchical linear regressions, the quantity of natural components in the childhood living environment did not predict long-term NR. Nighttime light and impervious surface at large geographic scales had significant but weak negative correlations with NR. Experiences of actual contact with nature, especially the experiences of interactive behaviors rather than merely visiting natural spaces, are better predictors than the objective environment. The interactive behaviors of observing natural processes and cultivating plants had significantly independent contributions to NR, even when other factors were included in the regression models. Nature education could not replace the role of actual contact with nature. This study implies that an urbanized living environment will not necessarily reduce the level of NR of future generations. Rather than simply increasing the quantity of natural components in urban areas, it is more important to support children’s interactive behaviors with nature.

Valuing nature through attention to urban greening offers some remedy to ‘Extinction of Experience’ – the decline in diversity and quality of people’s relationships to nature. Unfortunately, while the role and value of greenspaces are increasingly recognised, recognition and valuing does not always translate into beneficial experiences for urban dwellers. This study examined people’s relationships to greenspaces in the central business district (CBD) of Liverpool, New South Wales, Australia. Liverpool is a rapidly growing hub in outer metropolitan Sydney, where provision of greenspaces is generally acknowledged as inadequate. Space for plants is limited in city CBDs and these environments are especially challenging places to green, meaning that the quality of vegetation available for users is also often limited. Here, we report on an online survey conducted over the summer of 2019–2020, coinciding with the catastrophic Australian ‘black summer’ bushfires. It explored how people valued, used and experienced existing greenspaces in the CBD. Quantitative and qualitative results from 196 respondents illustrate that although most people agree on the benefits of greenspace, value it positively and use it regularly, three persistent concerns mediate their experiences: lack of shade, poor maintenance, and poor facilities. Further, and in addition to within space variation, experiences of greenspaces are negatively influenced by distance travelled and other barriers to what might otherwise be quality spaces. As the urban environment of Liverpool’s CBD undergoes rapid transformation to a higher activity (business/retail/services) and denser residential environment, there is an opportunity to translate the differences between values and experiences illustrated here to improve the design and quality of future greenspace. More broadly, this study indicates why the spatial dimensions of people’s relationships to urban nature requires more explicit and critical consideration within experience research.

The COVID-19 pandemic led to widespread repercussions, affecting all aspects of society, from global economics to everyday social interactions. Due to the significant uncertainty caused by the pandemic, many individuals sought solace from nature. Freshwater environments, or inland blue spaces, are one type of natural environment that may have acted as a vital public health resource for communities during the pandemic. This research used semi-structured interviews combined with narrative analysis to capture detailed insight into the impact of, and nuanced benefits and challenges associated with, accessing inland blue spaces over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants from a range of backgrounds across Scotland were involved to determine the influence of their health and ‘shielding’ status on inland blue space experiences. In the initial stages of the pandemic, those who were taking shielding precautions described experiencing a heightened awareness of, and anxiety towards, other users of inland blue spaces. However, across the sample, individuals emphasised the overall beneficial impact of accessing freshwater areas for maintaining mental and physical wellbeing levels during the pandemic. Positive health outcomes were achieved through participating in a wide range of leisure and recreational opportunities at inland blue spaces. The research further justifies the value of accessing inland blue spaces and demonstrates the benefits of integrating access and exposure to natural environments into future pandemic response strategies. The qualitative insight also highlights the need for context-specific landscape management strategies to promote blue space access across user groups and address existing environmental inequalities.

The Attention Restoration Theory (ART) proposed four essential indicators (being away, extent, fascinating, and compatibility) for understanding urban and natural restoration quality. However, previous studies have overlooked the impact of spatial structure (the visual relationships between scene entities) and neighboring environments on restoration quality as they mostly relied on isolated questionnaires or images. This study introduces a spatial-dependent graph neural networks (GNNs) approach to address this gap and explore the relationship between spatial structure and restoration quality at a city scale. Two types of graphs were constructed: street-level graphs using sequential street view images (SVIs) to capture visual relationships between entities and represent spatial structure, and city-level graphs modeling the topological relationships of roads to capture the spatial features of neighboring entities, integrating perceptual, spatial, and socioeconomic features to measure restoration quality. The results demonstrated that spatial-dependent GNNs outperform traditional models, achieving an accuracy (Acc) of 0.742 and an F1 score of 0.740, indicating their exceptional ability to capture features of adjacent spaces. Ablation experiments further revealed the substantial positive impact of spatial structure features on the predictive performance for restoration quality. Moreover, the study highlighted the greater significance of naturally relevant entities (e.g., trees) compared to artificial entities (e.g., buildings) in relation to high restoration quality. This study clarifies the association between spatial structure and restoration quality, providing a new perspective to improve urban well-being in the future.

Most urban green spaces (UGSs) today are under intensive maintenance practices, including mowing, cutting and/or chemical input, among many other practices. A growing body of research has questioned the biodiversity value of highly manicured UGSs and suggested the biodiversity potential of reduced-intensity maintenance regimes. However, the evidence for a relationship between maintenance and biodiversity in UGSs is still unclear and yet to be fully understood. This paper systematically reviews 92 published papers to examine this association. Our results showed a complex association between maintenance and biodiversity, mainly dependent on the type of maintenance practice studied and the measurement of biodiversity. Mowing was the predominant maintenance practice that had been investigated, and the evidence from these papers constantly reported a negative association between mowing intensity and various aspects of plant diversity. Similarly, reduced mowing intensity appeared to favour invertebrate diversity, yet many studies also found mixed associations as well as variations across taxonomic groups. The few studies on chemical input showed a negative association between the frequency of use of herbicides/pesticides/insecticides and the diversity of plants, invertebrates, and birds. Nuanced findings, including a non-linear association between maintenance intensity and biodiversity, and temporal/geographical differences, are discussed in this paper. This review offers insights for the development of biodiversity-friendly management strategies, highlighting existing research gaps and the need for further research concerning the maintenance-biodiversity link in UGSs.

In times of rapid urban expansion, urgent demand for housing and simultaneously efforts to minimise the use of urban land are competing objectives. The concept of large housing estates (LHE) has therefore regained interest. This resurgence raises questions about the living conditions within these historically stigmatised complexes. While liveability studies often rely on surveys, we present a globally applicable quantitative approach to assess liveability along the dimensions of walkability, accessibility and built-up morphology. Using geospatial data and a delineation framework based on walking distances, we identify disparities in liveability. We identified three different planning paradigms for LHEs in Germany: the ‘structured and low-dense’ type, the ‘urbanity by density’ type in Western Germany and the ‘socialistic city’ type in Eastern Germany. Our analysis reveals significant differences in accessibility and morphology, that can be attributed to the historical guiding principles. Walkability, in contrast, seems to be influenced more by environmental elements (rivers, forests) and artificial barriers (railway lines, motorways) than by planning paradigms. The ‘structured’ type is characterised by monofunctionality, limited access to urban infrastructure, low building density, but a high proportion of green spaces. The ‘urbanity by density’ type has significantly higher building densities, better accessibility, but less urban green. The ‘socialistic’ urban type could not be clearly categorised, but seems to be a mixture of the other two types. In our analysis, the ‘urbanity by density’ typology predominantly performed the best and, as such, emerges as the most liveable typology, potentially serving as a guiding model for future construction projects.