Investigation of urban green space equity at the city level and relevant strategies for improving the provisioning in China

Highlights

• Urban green space (UGS) is an important component of cities.

• Characteristics of UGS were studied in 58 major cities of China.

• Inequities in UGS were detected at the intercity level.

• Characteristics of UGS were driven by both natural and socioeconomic factors.

• Several recommendations for improving UGS were put forward.

Abstract

Urban green space (UGS) is essential for improving urban resilience and the well-being of residents, and UGS supply is an important aspect of the construction of eco-cities in China. As a quasi-public goods, compared to UGS equity studies within a city, there has been little research on UGS equity among different cities. This paper first established a conceptual framework for UGS provisioning of local governments, and then, based on multi-source data, the UGS equity among 58 major cities in China and the related influencing factors were investigated; lastly, strategies for making improvements were put forward. The findings showed that the proposed integrated conceptual framework could reveal the formational processes of current UGS in China’s cities, providing a coherent framework for UGS supply improvement. The average UGS of 58 cities was found to be in undersupply compared to current standards, and its spatial equity was not good; climate, urban topography, proportion of secondary industry, and title incentive factors exerted significant effects on UGS coverage, per capita UGS and accessible UGS; furthermore, the per capita gross domestic product (GDP) and land availability were found to have a significant influence on UGS coverage and per capita UGS; while population density only impacted the per capita UGS. Comprehensive governance strategies including policy innovations for the central government, capacity enhancements of local governments, UGS planning refinements in terms of contents, procedures, and standards, and the engagement of non-profit organizations should be implemented to strengthen the supply of UGS and alleviate intercity inequity.

Introduction

In 2018, 55 % of the world’s population lived in cities, and this figure is expected to increase to 60 % in 2030 (United Nations, 2018); meanwhile, cities produce about 80 % of the global gross domestic product (GDP) (Grübler and Fisk, 2013), but they only account for 2.85 % of the global land area (World Bank, 2010). Such high bearing of cities poses sustainable development challenges like environmental pollution, urban flooding, and greenhouse gas emissions. Urban green space (UGS) is considered to be an important component for improving sustainable development capacity, as it can provide various services that enhance the resilience of cities (James et al., 2009). In regard to ecological aspects, UGS can help to clean the atmosphere and shape local climate (Jim and Chen, 2008), mitigate urban heat island effects (Ziter et al., 2019), reduce urban runoff (Yao et al., 2015), increase carbon storage (Whitford et al., 2001), mitigate noise (Dzhambov and Dimitrova, 2015), and conserve biodiversity (Aronson et al., 2017). In terms of social aspects, UGS can promote public health (Jennings et al., 2017), provide various cultural services such as recreation, aesthetics, and educational opportunities (James et al., 2009), provide places for playing, strolling, relaxing, and social interactions (Byrne and Wolch, 2009), and promote psychological benefits like emotional and spiritual fulfillment and stress reduction (Engemann et al., 2019; Van Den Berg et al., 2007). In short, UGS plays a great role in urban sustainable development, community resilience, and residents well-being because of the above functions (Bertram and Rehdanz, 2015; Colding and Barthel, 2013; Tzoulas et al., 2007). However, UGS belongs to the category of quasi-public goods because of its competitive and non-exclusive nature (Chen et al., 2019), then the allocation of UGS embodies social fairness. Therefore, UGS equity has become an important research topic. Most of existing studies examined whether social and economic characteristics such as income, age, education, and ethnicity could affect UGS equity (Byrne and Wolch, 2009; Heynen et al., 2006; Kabisch and Haase, 2014; You, 2016); studies also further examined whether UGS inequity brought health or well-being disparities (Jennings et al., 2017).

Under the influence of multi-scale studies on environmental equity (Martínez-Alier, 2003), scholars recently begun to pay attention to the scale effect of UGS equity to seek effective policy interventions for preventing disparities (Tan and Samsudin, 2017). According to the connotation of environmental justice (Walker, 2012), in this paper UGS equity at the city level refers the idea that residents in different cities should have an equal supply of green space regardless of the cities’ size, natural endowment, development stage, geographical location, and so on. Notably, it is impossible to achieve the exact same UGS supply among cities because of local geographical and environmental differences, as well as it is a dynamic process (Chen et al., 2019). However, intercity UGS equity is a main performance goal for social and regional fairness (Van Den Berg et al., 2007), and thus, its legitimacy should not be neglected and denied. Some studies have revealed relationship involving a Kuznets curve between the UGS coverage and city GDP (Chen and Wang, 2013; Kijima et al., 2010); however, according to UGS equity goal at city level, governments should take initiatives to reduce this inequity of UGS among cities, and at the very least, they should ensure that basic demands for green space in undersupplied cities are addressed. With regards to UGS studies at the city level, earlier works (Joassart-Marcelli, 2010; Joassart-Marcelli et al., 2011; Rigolon et al., 2018; Wüstemann et al., 2017) have explored UGS differences from the perspective of equity, while other studies mainly investigated the spatial pattern and influencing factors of UGS (Chen and Wang, 2013; Kabisch et al., 2016; Song et al., 2018; Yang et al., 2014; Zhu and Zhang, 2008), with no emphasis placed on UGS equity. There were also some literatures in Chinese, focusing on the spatial pattern and spatio-temporal differentiation of city level UGS, and explaining its reasonableness (Xu et al., 2019a; Liu et al., 2018, 2019).

Cities with a larger middle class and lower numbers of Latino and black residents tend to have more park provisions in the United States (Rigolon et al., 2018) in part because these cities are at disadvantage when applying for park funding and may lack nonprofits to assist with park construction (Joassart-Marcelli, 2010; Joassart-Marcelli et al., 2011). The UGS supply at the city level in Europe also shows such unfairness (Fuller and Gaston, 2009; Wüstemann et al., 2017). China has a vast territory, and its cities are now in the rapid growth phase; however, China is presently facing serious imbalances in terms of regional development that not only involves income disparities, but also well-being inequities (Li et al., 2017). Although UGS inequity caused by ethnic differences is not prominent in China, other factors such as income, natural endowments, and some China-specific factors like urban land supply may be affecting UGS equity at the city level (Chen and Hu, 2015). Recently, regional differences in UGS have been acknowledged, and the central government is supposed to take initiatives to relieve such inequity (Li et al., 2018). Thus, UGS equity investigations at the city level will be important to meet the demands of social justice, as such studies can uncover key influencing factors that may be elusive at the community scale, so as to assist with the development of effective integrated policies for alleviating regional disparities.

The term UGS in this paper mainly refers to parks and recreational green space as described in the classification system of MHURD, 2017, and these areas are focused on because they represent public nature spaces with open access and is an important indicator of overall urban environmental quality. In comparison to the available literature, the novel contributions of this paper are as follows: the first is the establishment of an UGS supply framework for local governments, which can be used to conceptually inspect how local governments provide UGS under current fiscal, land allocation, and urban planning institution; the second is the investigation of UGS equity at the city level carried out with the use of the Gini index and multivariate linear regression tools based on multi-source data including community points of interest (POIs), spatial UGS data, and related socioeconomic data (existing literature has rarely reported on China’s UGS equity at the city level with spatial UGS to reveal potential trends); lastly, improved strategies for different aspects are put forward to strengthen UGS supply equity.