Claim Discipline for Informal Urban Green Spaces: Term-Level Evidence on Ecological Retention, Direct Contact, and Service Interaction

Abstract

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.