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Volume 113 Issue 4
- 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
by
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.
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.