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2023
- Research article
by
1Department of Real Estate Management, HungKuo Delin University of Technology, No. 1, Lane 380, Qingyun Road, Tucheng District, New Taipei City
- Volume 113 Issue 4
- Pages: 160
- - 173
- https://doi.org/10.70517/la20231134-10
Urban greenspace access measures are often based on residential walking distance despite the fact that children and teenagers interact with their urban environment in school, college, university, and via travel routes. This paper analyzes whether residential reach to public greenspace amenities in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and The Hague is translated into educational and travel-related contacts for youth. The analysis is based on access quantities for 848 publicly accessible greenspaces including 398 in Amsterdam, 281 in Rotterdam and 169 in The Hague. The data source differentiates children between the ages of 0 and 14 years old and adolescents between the ages of 15 and 24 years old and includes the following categories: residence-based walksheds, education-based walksheds, modeled commute entry, commute-distance exposure, dispersion values, and Spearman rank associations. To investigate the degree to which residential access is translated into contact with greenspaces, we compare three approaches, namely residence proximity, nearby educational institutions, and travel through greenspaces to access educational institutions. The increase of the walking distance from 300 m to 800 m leads to approximately a five-fold increase of mean residential access for residents, children, and adolescents. However, this larger distance does not translate into similar levels of exposure. An 800 m walking distance results in the average greenspace being accessible for 1203.6 children and 937.3 adolescents. On the other hand, there is an average of only 2.0 child-oriented and 1.1 adolescent-oriented educational institutions within 800 m. The modeled commute entry drops to 68.7 children and 34.6 adolescents per greenspace. Adjusting for resident-accessible youth, the commute entry rate for adolescents is 35.33% less than for children. Commute entries of adolescents are also extremely concentrated. Their coefficient of variation is 4.36 and maximum to mean is 66.10. These findings show that residential reach can be successfully applied for the identification of young residents near greenspace amenities, but not for youth exposure, particularly in adolescent learning routes. Monitoring of municipal exposure to greenspaces should separate residential, educational, and route-based exposures.
- Research article
Annual Conversion of Green-Space Expansion into Socioeconomic and Ecological Benefit in Xi’an, China
by
1School of Environmental Planning and Design Continental Research University France
- Volume 113 Issue 4
- Pages: 142
- - 159
- https://doi.org/10.70517/la20231134-09
Green space statistics in the annual unit may overestimate the effectiveness of planning efforts if the two are not correlated in their movement. This study applies the ERC analysis to Xi’an, China, based on the 2009–2019 series of annual statistics on per capita green space area, built-up land, socioeconomic benefit, ecological benefit, overall benefit, and four ecological processes, namely cooling, humidification, oxygen release, and carbon fixation. Each increase/decrease in green space area is matched with changes in socioeconomic and ecological performance, in a way that the annual information is transformed to ten successive intervals. Based on this transformation, this analysis computes conversion yield, productive conversion, expansion lag, contraction stress, recovery without expansion, and ecological coordination as the minimum of four ecological process scores. Xi’an had five productive conversion intervals, three expansion lag intervals, one contraction stress interval, and one recovery interval without any scale increase. The best interval was 2016–2017: the increment in per capita green space area was 1.70 m2 person−1, and that of socioeconomic, ecological, and overall benefit was 0.21, 0.18, and 0.20, respectively, leading to a highest conversion yield of 0.118 score units for each m2 person−1 of new green space area. The intervals of 2011–2012, 2012–2013, and 2015–2016 indicated that additional green space area does not correlate well with benefit response. In particular, ecological coordination was best in 2017, in which four ecological process scores were at or above 0.69, while the 2015 combination of good ecological score and low humidification floor (0.03) revealed ecological imbalance. It appears that annual green space performance in Xi’an relied heavily on conversion yield and ecological process balance rather than on per capita green space area. The target of 28.5–29.0 m2 person−1 can be justifiable if coupled with monitoring of conversion yield and minimum ecological process score.
- Research article
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1Department of Landscape Architecture, Stuart Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania, 119 Meyerson Hall, 210 South 34th Street, Philadelphia, PA19104-6311, USA
2Department of Real Estate Management, HungKuo Delin University of Technology, No. 1, Lane 380, Qingyun Road, Tucheng District, New Taipei City
- Volume 113 Issue 4
- Pages: 121
- - 141
- https://doi.org/10.70517/la20231134-08
The evaluation of park conditions provides a mean condition score in urban park-quality assessment, while the city authorities need to address a more practical question: which parks demonstrate contextual vulnerability along with low domain floors, poor balance between domains, and sufficient park-user exposure? This study elaborates a method called Exposure-Sensitive Contextual Fragility Profiling (ECFP), a straightforward approach to interpret compact park-audit results that prevents the dominance of spatial aspects in concealing safety support, cleanliness, physical order, sensory richness, proper illumination, and acoustic conditions problems. Data for analysis comprise twelve urban parks in Tenerife (Canary Islands, Spain), observed based on eleven subcategories of the Public Space Characteristics Observation Questionnaire along with user-count statistics obtained from 155 frequent park users. The calculation procedure uses four components: contextual vulnerability, the deficit in the weakest domain floor, spatial, functional, and contextual balance, and the percentage of contextual subcategories scoring below the half-point on the 0–10 audit scale. Logarithmic exposure adjustment uses user counts without permitting the domination of high-sample parks in assessing environmental conditions. Order produced by ECFP assigned Polideportivo El Casco and Parque El Quijote to the top two places followed by Parque Primero de Mayo, Parque Punta Larga, and Parque de Guadamojete. In terms of park fragility, Parque Primero de Mayo outranks all other parks since it ranks well above average due to low levels of lighting, safety support, acoustics, sensory stimuli alongside excellent physical order. The sensitivity tests revealed high Spearman rank correlations in the range of 0.923 to 1.000 depending on the omission of each component and critical value adjustments. The research findings suggest that urban park repairs should start with ensuring the contextual aspects underlying accessibility, visual appeal, legibility, and usability of a park.
- Research article
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1School of English Language and culture, Xi’an Fanyi University, Xi’an, Shaanxi, 710105, China
- Volume 113 Issue 3
- Pages: 107
- - 120
- https://doi.org/10.70517/la20231133-07
Hot-desert deck parks need thermal evidence of whether occupied spaces reach comfort-relevant end states, not whether the design reduces some calculated heat load. In this paper, a novel Residual Thermal Sufficiency Analysis (RTSA) is formulated based on COMFA, an approach used to quantify distances between final temperatures and comfort intervals for adults and children. The application of RTSA is demonstrated for a 31,700 m2 freeway deck park in downtown El Paso, Texas, considering the documented local climate, ENVI-met simulation validation, COMFA sensation limits, changes in site-scale microclimatology, and four occupied-place level COMFA transitions. RTSA helps answer questions about which spaces reach thermal sufficiency after the design, which do not and remain either warm or cool, and what physical control measures need to be applied to close the rest of the distance. The response to intervention at the site scale was relatively modest, involving a 0.67 ∘C drop in air temperature and a 0.30% increase in relative humidity, while substantial reductions were achieved for solar radiation (−25.2%) and wind speed (−17.2%). At the place scale, however, a different ranking emerged. Water plaza had the greatest reduction in COMFA value (from 247 to 69 W m−2), yet it retained significant adult and child heat residual (19 and 29 W m−2 according to Brown and Gillespie thresholds). Amphitheater and pedestrian street had similar performance, falling from 147 and 149 to 46 and 42 W m−2, achieving adult sufficiency under the Brown and Gillespie limits, respectively. Pedestrian street had just 2 W m−2 exceeding the child upper limit. Winter green patch was adjusted from −101 to −55 W m−2. The findings highlight the necessity of focusing thermal design decisions on residual distance, occupant category, season, and activity zones. RTSA can show designers in which spaces further canopy, misting, surface cooling, or permeable shelter from wind needs to be considered.
- Research article
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1Department of Urban Design and Landscape Planning Greenfield State University United States
- Volume 113 Issue 3
- Pages: 91
- - 106
- https://doi.org/10.70517/la20231133-06
Urban green infrastructure planning initiatives are becoming increasing likely to include promises related to climate change, stormwater management, urban heat mitigation, ecological restoration, and enhanced quality of public space. The question of the equity effectiveness of these plans hinges upon whether promises translate into institution-building around definition, recognition of disparate vulnerability, transfer of community control into design and implementation, impact assessment, anti-displacement, and just allocation of green jobs. This paper investigates 122 green infrastructure plans across 20 American cities in relation to ten categories of equity practice, namely definition, framing, justice, planning, design, implementation, evaluation, hazard, value, and labor. The research includes development of Ordinal Sufficiency Partitioning as a method of reading five-state plan quality ratings as ordered distributions rather than interval-scale scores. Results show an institutional discontinuity. Value, planning, and hazard practices exhibit the greatest development, characterized by sufficiency ratios of 45.0%, 43.4%, and 41.2%, respectively. Definition and justice exhibit least sufficiency, scoring at 8.8% and 11.9% with non-operative drag above 86%. Design and labor categories have been minimally developed with functional sufficiency at 2.0% and 4.0%, respectively. With respect to life-cycle practice, value has lower sufficiency compared to procedure and distribution; that is, plans often articulate potential benefits while failing to specify a definition of equitable benefit, identify decision makers and provide oversight thereafter. In terms of addressing the fundamental questions asked, the findings speak to themselves, revealing that officially-sanctioned green infrastructure plans lack a cohesive and effective process of building equity-operability.
- Research article
Regime Capability and Repair Priority in European Policy Portfolios for Urban Nature-Based Solutions
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1College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
- Volume 113 Issue 2
- Pages: 72
- - 90
- https://doi.org/10.70517/la20231132-05
Today, nature-based solutions in urban environments need to be regarded not only as projects but also as infrastructure for adaptation, restoration, moderation, cooling, public health, and overall quality of life. However, their increasing use relies on policy portfolios that should provide more than mere regulations, funding, or guidance documents. Rather, they have to build at least some level of capability within a broad set of institutional, economic, technical, cultural, and delivery conditions within which urban infrastructure is planned, built, financed, maintained, and valued. In this article, we introduce Regime-Capability Readiness Assessments for seven European case studies: European Union, Germany, Hungary, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Our approach converts policy-instrument codes into four capability states – from vacant to anchored and then combines these indicators based on three metrics: sufficiency of instrument families, capped regime saturation, and bottlenecks protection. Consequently, the developed Implementation-Readiness and Repair Index provides information on how close each portfolio is to being capable of sustaining routine nature-based implementation. The European Union demonstrates the highest score, 96.6, due to sufficiency of all instrument families and absence of any vacuum or fragility in its regime dimensions. While Germany possesses strong capacity of policy making, it suffers in its implementation readiness due to the lack of functioning industry-network and physical technology elements. The United Kingdom and Sweden find themselves in an intermediate position with their distinctive needs for repair: Sweden lacks economic and usage practice capabilities, while the United Kingdom requires financial and funding repairs. Despite retaining strong knowledge base, the Netherlands still require further development. Finally, both Spain and Hungary require further strengthening of foundational elements. It turns out that capacity assessment should always consider the issue of capability development.
- Research article
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1Senior Advisor in Environmental Planning and Conservation Global Landscape Policy Institute United Kingdom
- Volume 113 Issue 2
- Pages: 56
- - 71
- https://doi.org/10.70517/la20231132-04
In recent years, informal urban green spaces have come to be seen as assets for ecology and society alike amid dense, stratified and climatically vulnerable cityscapes. Ecological and social planning rationales behind informal urban green space may involve habitat conservation, cooling, stormwater management, recreation, aesthetics, and production; however, these rationales are differently well founded depending on the specific nature of the space, which includes brownfields, vacant land or lots, wastelands, urban wildness, spontaneous vegetation, and even the label of informal green space itself. This paper investigates whether the ecological services associated with each category rest on empirical support for the interactions among them. An existing inventory of 112 academic publications addressing informal green-space ecosystem services was parsed out in terms of service load, ecological-retention share, direct-contact share, multi-service treatment, intervention exposure, interaction-audit coverage, and potential-use liability. It turns out that vacant land and lots carry the greatest potential-use liability in the amount of 50.6 due to their future-oriented focus coupled with just 4.2% interaction-audit coverage. Multi-service treatment among brownfields is relatively defensible at 75.8%, as much as the interaction-audit coverage is at 24.0%, yet the vast majority of the brownfield papers do not consider service interaction. Informal green spaces are least exposed to liability due to its descriptive nature rather than being a physically changing target. Wastelands exhibit the largest share of ecological retention in 77.9%, and neither urban wildness nor spontaneous vegetation papers contain any data on interaction audit coverage.
- Research article
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1Department of Garden History and Landscape Heritage Royal Urban Studies Institute United Kingdom
- Volume 113 Issue 1
- Pages: 38
- - 55
- https://doi.org/10.70517/la20231131-03
Coastal adaptation requires a direct contrast between the level of local climate pressure and the utility provided by the functions associated with the blue-green action. In this case, we focus on Chennai and Kochi, Indian coastal cities facing climate pressure from exposure to sea-level rise, heavy rain, warming, drainage challenges, and land use. These two cities experience all five pressures without generating similar climate adaptation needs. Hydro-Institutional Adaptation Partitioning (HIAP) is used to translate the values of 2080 climate projections and planning actions into four pairs of dimensions that include: thermal pressure, sea-level pressure, rainfall-regime pressure, and extreme-event pressure. The planning cover was operationalized based on national policy and planning program support, climate planning, wetland/biodiversity projects, and participation in canal governance. It is observed that the two cities had a consistent number of action classes of four, yet different adaptation needs. Chennai has the larger sea-level coefficient than that of Kochi and maintains small uncovered pressure in both thermal and sea-level dimensions. On the other hand, Kochi has the highest overall climate pressure due to high levels of warming and decline in mean rainfall. The latter also maintains the larger uncovered pressure related to thermal moderation and rainfall retention capacity. Sensitivity tests revealed that the uncovered climate pressure in Kochi increased with respect to heat-dryness weighting, whereas Chennai stayed responsive to sea-level drainages and heat sensitive open spaces.
- Research article
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1College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
2Turenscape Urban Planning and Design Co., Ltd., Beijing 100080, China
- Volume 113 Issue 1
- Pages: 20
- - 37
- https://doi.org/10.70517/la20231131-02
High-resolution overhead imagery captures building arrangement, street structure, vegetation cover, industrial land use, water surfaces, and outdoor activity space in a resolution appropriate for neighborhood analysis. However, semantic classification of such imagery is reduced to an ordinal score by counting favorable criteria, despite the difference in recognition reliability between visual cues and the possibility of moving from one class to another by changing one indicator alone. An Evidence-Calibrated Urban Scene Quality Index (ECUSQI) was devised to convert five semantically identifiable visual indicators into a reliability-based five-point scale. We analyzed a test set of 3038 labeled samples of urban imagery patches extracted from central Changsha (China) among 3874 RGB patches of 250 × 250 pixels with 0.5 m ground sampling distance (GSD). Recognition reliability of 615 test scenes with respect to open building layout, grid-like street structure, vegetation coverage, lack of industrial areas, and presence of activity space was estimated in the training procedure. Jeffreys smoothing of recognition reliability normalizes each indicator increase, the posterior uncertainty component identifies scores based on less reliable semantic information, and the threshold margin term points out classes determined by a less confident inference. The test dataset includes 527 scenes with five correct decisions, 77 with four, 9 with three, and 2 with two, implying an average of 4.836 correct and 0.164 incorrect indicator interpretations per scene. The accuracies of indicators range from 93.17% for buildings to 98.86% for industrial areas. Co-attention reduces the expectation of indicator mistakes by 58.0% and decreases the multi-mistake probability by 8.48% to 1.79%. In the spatial interpretation, ECUSQI is lower in more densely populated districts of older construction and higher in green residential areas with open structure and activity space. Our index serves a concrete measuring purpose, since reliable overhead semantic information can inform fine-grained environmental evaluation, along with its threshold sensitivity.
- Research article
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1Department of Landscape Planning, Prairie State University, United States
2Department of Environmental Design, Coastal Research University, United States
- Volume 113 Issue 1
- Pages: 1
- - 19
- https://doi.org/10.70517/la20231131-01
Now that the greening of climate infrastructure is firmly established as part of urban adaptation, however, civic effectiveness is more complicated than hydrology, cooling capacity, plant cover or space design alone. Socially fragile adaptation occurs where greening brings local benefits to people who face displacement pressure, selective redevelopment, access restrictions and weakened local identity. In this study, Resident Retention Gate Analysis (RRGA) is introduced as an ordinal civic calculation of the likelihood that socio-environmental benefits are usable by marginalized residents. Applying the calculation involves mapping a civic record of each of four neighborhoods in Boston, Philadelphia, Amsterdam and Barcelona: their histories, their climate/environmental problems, their greening interventions, their redevelopment pressures, their distribution of civic interviews and the order magnitude of their benefits in terms of recognition, displacement experience, displacement threat, development, dissatisfaction, green gentrification fears, unequal access and social cohesion disruption. RRGA turns those order-magnitudes into civic gates based on three civic criteria: tenure stability, public development orientation and continuity of access/belonging. It calculates the retained benefit score by multiplying recognized benefit with the average of the two constraints and the dominant one. The retention deficits are worst in East Boston due to high tenure pressure and greening associated with the marketization of waterfront amenities, where only a small civic gate makes room for benefits that are already recognized to be moderate. The retained benefit score is highest in Hunting Park, whose high greening need has been coupled with low marketization pressure, despite green gentrification fears being very real there. The Amsterdam Noord case features a bottleneck situation caused by investment-led greening and creative redevelopment, as well as waterfront amenities. The most exclusionary and protection-focused tension between benefits and constraints emerges in Poblenou, where high need for greening is compounded by strong displacement and redevelopment pressures. Conclusion: Climate-adaptive greening should be evaluated in terms of resident retention – the crucial question here being whether the affected community will remain nearby, able to govern, access and take ownership of their environmental improvement.
Call for Papers
Landscape Architecture invites submissions for Volume 2026, Issue 3, scheduled for publication in September 2026. The journal welcomes high-quality scholarly contributions that advance research, theory, criticism, and applied knowledge in landscape architecture and related fields.