Inequitable distribution of green public space in the Mexico City: an environmental injustice case

Abstract

Este artículo presenta un análisis de la distribución de espacios públicos verdes (EPV) en la Ciudad de México como un caso de injusticia ambiental urbana. Se utilizan datos espaciales y demográficos, asimismo, para llevar a cabo este análisis se calculó un Índice de Necesidad de Parques (INP) para las 16 delegaciones de la ciudad. Los resultados muestran que la distribución del EPV está directamente correlacionado con las características demográficas de los sectores socioeconómicos bajos de la ciudad. Estos hallazgos se alinean con la postulación de la Teoría de Justicia Ambiental en el sentido de que los servicios ambientales urbanos se distribuyen inequitativamente con respecto a las poblaciones marginadas.

Access to Urban Green Space in Cities of the Global South: A Systematic Literature Review

“…Studies in other Asian cities such as Sheikhupura, Pakistan [69], Tehran, Iran [71,84], and Hamadan, Iran [46] also found inequitable results for green space quantity. All sampled articles that measured quantity in Latin America [18,20,72,73] and Africa [21,77,85,89,96] discovered inequities. Effect sizes for inequities were particularly large in some studies that measured green space area per capita [21,73,85].…”

“…Yet this would require that elected officials had the political will and support to invest in low-SES areas. Other authors argue that institutional and policy changes that overturn the roots of inequities are necessary [73] and that such efforts should include participatory planning processes that include residents' needs [25,90]. In addition, some authors note that, due to high residential densities and urbanization rates, some Global South cities should focus on building small, walkable parks [20,103] and on transforming unused vacant land [88,119] rather than seeking to build large urban green spaces.…”

“…Finally, articles had to report descriptive or inferential statistics. We decided to include articles that only reported descriptive statistics because, due to the limited availability of data on urban green space or SES in some Global South countries [47,[71][72][73][74], many articles had relatively small n sizes, which made it not feasible to conduct and report inferential statistics.…”

“…We did not find any relevant studies for most African countries and several countries in South Asia, and very few articles emerged for most Latin American countries. While the high number of studies conducted in China might be explained by its very large population size and its tremendous growth in the higher education sector, the lack of articles in other geographical contexts might be partly attributed to data availability issues [47,[71][72][73][74].…”

“…Second, we included studies that only reported descriptive statistics and did not conduct inferential statistics. As noted, we made this decision because, due to data limitations in Global South contexts [47,[71][72][73][74], some studies have relatively small n sizes and therefore could not run inferential statistical tests. Still, interpreting the results of studies that only relied on descriptive statistics was harder; as such, three of the authors in this review cross-checked such results.…”