Urban Green Accessibility Index: A Measure of Pedestrian-Centered Accessibility to Every Green Point in an Urban Area

Abstract

Advancements in remote sensing techniques and urban data analysis tools have enabled the successful monitoring and detection of green spaces in a city. This study aims to develop an index called the urban green accessibility (UGA) index, which measures people’s accessibility to green space and represents the citywide or local characteristics of the distribution pattern of green space. The index is defined as the sum of pedestrians’ accessibility to all vegetation points, which consists of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) with integration and choice values from angular segment analysis. In this study, the proposed index is tested with cases of New York, NY, and San Francisco, CA, in the US. The results reveal differences based on the significance of streets. When analysis ranges are on a neighborhood scale, a few hotspots appear in well-known green areas on commonly accessible streets and in local neighborhood parks on residential blocks. The appearance of high-accessibility points in low-NDVI areas implies the potential of the efficient and proper distribution of green spaces for pedestrians. The proposed measure is expected to help in planning and managing green areas in cities, taking people’s accessibility and spatial relationships into consideration.

Mosque as a multi-functional public space destination: potential breathing space in dense urban fabrics of Hail City, Saudi Arabia

“…To begin, a spatial configuration analysis with a 400 m buffer (approximately five minutes walking distance) was performed to better understand the urban planning conditions related to public space (Loutzenheiser, 1997; Alshalalfah and Shalaby, 2007; El-Geneidy et al. , 2014; Jang et al. , 2020).…”

“…The main focus of analysis in this paper is how mosque social-spatial public space conditions relate to the surrounding local context, which is divided into two levels. To begin, a spatial configuration analysis with a 400 m buffer (approximately five minutes walking distance) was performed to better understand the urban planning conditions related to public space (Loutzenheiser, 1997;Alshalalfah and Shalaby, 2007;El-Geneidy et al, 2014;Jang et al, 2020). Second, based on fieldwork, urban factors observation and community feedback, a conceptual design proposal for one of the mosque cases is proposed to demonstrate how any given mosque place can be transformed into a multifunctional community public space.…”

A Systematic Review with Framework Synthesis of the Ways That Urban Environments Influence Opportunities for Healthy and Sustainable Mobility in Older Age

“…While these studies did not focus exclusively on older people, the estimated health benefits for older people are likely to be higher, given older people’s higher health risks and greater likelihood of benefitting from increased physical activity [ 9 ]. The use of sustainable transport also enables older people to access resources that support health, such as green space [ 12 ], health care [ 13 ], and grocery stores [ 14 ]. Furthermore, it increases older people’s capacity to carry out everyday activities of value [ 15 ], particularly discretionary trips that contribute significantly to quality of life [ 16 ].…”

Inequality in urban green space benefits: Combining street greenery and park greenery

“…An evaluation study on Shanghai parks by Fan et al [ 2 ] explored two aspects of accessibility—travel distance to physical space using different traffic modes, and the quality of parks with regard to facilities, area, quietness, spaciousness, etc. Jang et al, [ 44 ] agreed that UGS accessibility research should not only study the distance to parks, but also the amount of greenery in UGS, the distance to the nearest road, and the topological importance (i.e., traffic flow on the road) involved in access to UGS.…”