Urban Green Spaces Prospects and Retrospect’s

Abstract

Urban green spaces (UGSs) are integral structural elements of the city’s existence and are promoted to serve diverse functions such as recreation, ecological services, regulation of ambient air temperature and hydrological regime pollution abatement, social inclusion, enhancing amenity value, etc., in sum, they help minimize the adverse impacts of urbanization on the environment and improve citizens’ habitable experiences. However, due to competing economic interests and demand on land for various purposes such as residential, commercial, industrial and institutional, UGS in cities take a back seat and are seldom given desired attention, and Indian cities are no exception. The challenges faced by UGS are many and include Land availability, quantity, quality, distribution, accessibility, lack of intended purpose and stakeholder participation. Therefore, it is imperative to explore strategies for planning UGS to ensure their adequate provision and maintenance in cities. Unlike Western countries cities in India have diverse classification and hierarchy of green spaces, therefore, this text examines typology of green spaces, their provisions, associated benefits, emergent concerns in the Indian context through case studies and concludes with plausible strategies for inclusion in urban planning framework.

Temporal changes in green spaces of Guwahati city, Assam, India with special reference to tree community structure of selected urban green patches

“…This can negatively affect the biotic communities within the green spaces and can also interfere with the role of urban green spaces in biodiversity conservation. Similar type of observations has been made in a study by Sangwan et al (2022), which mentions about the challenges faced by the urban green spaces of many of the Indian cities due to competing economic interests and demand on lands for various purposes such as residential, commercial, industrial and institutional. In a case study of Noida (Sharma et al 2022), it has been noticed that the green spaces are isolated and fragmented limiting the additive bene ts that can be derived from larger interconnected green spaces.…”