Landscape and Urban Planning最新文献

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.

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.