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Towards a High-Fidelity Assessment of Urban Green Spaces Walking Accessibility

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Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2020 (ICCSA 2020)

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Abstract

Urban Public Green Spaces (UPGS) available at walking distance are a vital component of urban quality of life, of citizens’ health, and ultimately of the right to the city. Their demand has suddenly become even more ostensive due to the measures of “social distancing” and the restrictions of movement imposed in many countries during the COVID-19 outbreak, showing the importance of the public urban parks and green open spaces located near homes and accessible by foot. Hence, the idea of “green self-sufficiency” at the local, neighbourhood and sub-neighbourhood level has emerged as a relevant objective to pursue. For this purpose, we have constructed a high-fidelity evaluation model to assess the walking accessibility of UPGS at the highly granular spatial scale of street network nodes. The evaluation procedure is based on a novel index constructed around the concept of distance-cumulative deficit, scoring nodes with respect to all the available UPGS within their catchment area of slope-corrected walking distance of 2 km. To showcase the possible outputs of the evaluation procedure and their exploratory analyses, we present an application on the city of Cagliari, Italy. In doing that, we argue that the proposed evaluation approach is an advancement over the traditional (density-based) approaches of assessment of green area availability, and that it provides an intuitive, flexible and extendable tool useful to better evaluate and understand the current and the potential accessibility of urban green space, and to support urban planning, policy making and design.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Architecture, University of Cagliari, 09129, Cagliari, Italy

    Ivan Blečić & Valeria Saiu

  2. Department of Architecture, Design and Urbanism, University of Sassari, 07041, Alghero, Italy

    Giuseppe A. Trunfio

Authors
  1. Ivan Blečić
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  2. Valeria Saiu
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  3. Giuseppe A. Trunfio
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ivan Blečić .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Perugia, Perugia, Italy

    Osvaldo Gervasi

  2. University of Basilicata, Potenza, Potenza, Italy

    Beniamino Murgante

  3. Chair- Center of ICT/ICE, Covenant University, Ota, Nigeria

    Sanjay Misra

  4. University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy

    Chiara Garau

  5. University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy

    Ivan Blečić

  6. Clayton School of Information Technology, Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia

    David Taniar

  7. Department of Information Science, Kyushu Sangyo University, Fukuoka, Japan

    Bernady O. Apduhan

  8. University of Minho, Braga, Portugal

    Ana Maria A. C. Rocha

  9. Polytechnic University of Bari, Bari, Italy

    Eufemia Tarantino

  10. Polytechnic University of Bari, Bari, Italy

    Carmelo Maria Torre

  11. Department of Neurology, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, MA, USA

    Yeliz Karaca

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Blečić, I., Saiu, V., Trunfio, G.A. (2020). Towards a High-Fidelity Assessment of Urban Green Spaces Walking Accessibility. In: Gervasi, O., et al. Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2020. ICCSA 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12252. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58811-3_39

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58811-3_39

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