English

On the need to move from a single indicator to a multi-dimensional framework to measure accessibility to urban green

Physics and Society 2023-08-11 v1 Computers and Society

Abstract

With the recent expansion of urban greening interventions, the definition of spatial indicators to measure the provision of urban greenery has become of pivotal importance in informing the policy-design process. By analyzing the stability of the population and area rankings induced by several indicators of green accessibility for over 1,000 cities worldwide, we investigate the extent to which the use of a single metric provides a reliable assessment of green accessibility in a city. The results suggest that, due to the complex interaction between the spatial distribution of greenspaces in an urban center and its population distribution, the use of a single indicator might lead to insufficient discrimination across areas or subgroups of the population, even when focusing on one form of green accessibility. From a policy perspective, this indicates the need to switch toward a multi-dimensional framework that is able to organically evaluate a range of indicators at once.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2308.05538,
  title  = {On the need to move from a single indicator to a multi-dimensional framework to measure accessibility to urban green},
  author = {Alice Battiston and Rossano Schifanella},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.05538},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

23 pages (11 main), 5 main figures, 1 main table. Supporting web interface see http://atgreen.hpc4ai.unito.it/