Urban green space (UGS) has many environmental and social benefits. UGS provision and access are increasingly considered in urban policies and must rely on data and indicators that can capture ...variations in the distribution of UGS within cities. There is no consensus about how UGS, and their provision and access, must be defined from different land use data types. Here we identify four spatial dimensions of UGS and critically examine how different data sources affect these dimensions and our understanding of their variation within a city region (Brussels). We compare UGS indicators measured from an imagery source (NDVI from Landsat), an official cadastre-based map, and the voluntary geographical information provided by OpenStreetMap (OSM). We compare aggregate values of provision and access to UGS as well as their spatial distribution along a centrality gradient and at neighbourhood scale. We find that there are strong differences in the value of indicators when using the different datasets, especially due to their ability to capture private and public green space. However we find that the interpretation of intra-urban spatial variations is not affected by changes in data source. Centrality in particular is a strong determinant of the relative values of UGS availability, fragmentation and accessibility, irrespective of datasets.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
We determine the functional form and scaling law of radial artificial land use profiles in 300 European functional urban areas (FUAs). These profiles, starting from a fully artificial surface in the ...city center, decrease exponentially, the faster the smaller the city. More precisely, the characteristic decrease distance scales like the square root of total population, meaning that the artificial surface of cities is proportional to their population. This also means that the amount of artificial land per capita is independent of city size, and that larger cities are not more or less parsimonious in terms of land use than smaller ones.
•First multilevel hedonic model with landscape amenities and neighbourhood services.•Opposite effects of landscape diversity at different distances.•Spatial heterogeneity effects in the valuation of ...local land-use diversity.•No impact of services diversity at sub-municipal scale.•Multilevel model captures context effects and spatial autocorrelation.
The article aims at revealing the role of green space diversity and the mix of neighborhood services on the price of residential land in Luxembourg. We use a multilevel approach to estimate a hedonic model in order to benefit from the hierarchical structure of the data and to reveal spatial heterogeneity in the valuation of these neighborhood qualities. In addition to standard accessibility and socio-economic variables, we include geographical variables in the form of neighborhood mix indices and a Shannon diversity index of land-uses. Via a spatial cross-regressive specification we also test whether our nested levels are able to capture most of the spatial dependence. Our results show that the presence of a mix of services and green space does not directly impact prices, but that the diversity of land-uses (Shannon index) matters, and has negative effects when considered within immediate proximity and positive effects within a walking distance. Land use effects however vary spatially and emphasize the contrast between regions that are particularly attractive and picturesque, and the former industrial conurbation. In our case we also show the ability of the multilevel approach to capture spatial auto-correlation effects.
Theoretical developments are needed to interpret the increasing amount of large-scale spatial data about past settlements. So far, settlement patterns have mostly been considered as passive imprints ...of past human activities and most theories are limited to ecological processes. Locational and spatial interactions have scarcely been included as long-term driving forces of settlement systems but hold promise to explain large-scale patterns. This paper proposes a conceptual model for long-term spatial adaptive settlement systems based on the complex adaptive systems framework and both spatial and cross-scale interactions. The goal of the model is to find new ways of interpreting archaeological location data and understand settlement systems as emerging from micro-choices of population units interacting in space. The conceptualisation is carried out on a level that it can be used to bridge hunter-gatherer and urban theories.
We first describe settlement patterns based on concepts from archaeological locational studies and social-ecological systems. Second, we identify the abstract spatial and aspatial entities of the system and describe the potential relations between them. Using knowledge from previous research, we then map both empirically observable and abstract system entities and predict links between them in order to come up with an overarching conceptual framework. The system is based on residential choice mechanisms and exposes several cross-scale feedback loops between the micro-level choices and the settlement system emerging at the meso-level. We finally argue that the proposed adaptive settlement system framework has the potential to bring new insights into long-term processes, especially through dynamic spatial simulation, and at the same time, provides an interpretational framework for archaeological records and empirical spatial analysis. Examples of its applications in archaeological research are introduced.
•A framework linking micro-level choices to the emergence of settlement systems.•Integrates social-ecological systems and spatial interaction for locational data analysis.•Identification of feedback loops between individual choices and settlement dynamics.•Archaeological locational models help to decode past social-ecological systems.
Air pollution is of increasing concern to urban residents and urban planners are struggling to find interventions which tackle the trade‐off between environmental, health, and economic impacts ...arising from this. We analyze within a spatially explicit theoretical residential choice model how different urban interventions can reduce exposure to endogenous traffic‐induced air pollution at residential locations. We model a city of fixed population size, where households are averse to localized pollution and examine how a flat commuting tax, an urban growth boundary, a cordon toll, and the optimal distance‐based tax compare to an urban scenario without any planner's intervention. We find that an urban intervention to optimally address exposure concerns needs to achieve steep density gradients near the urban fringe and flat gradients near the center. We show the deficiencies of the alternative interventions to achieve optimal population distributions within the city and in a scenario where peoples' aversion to pollution increases. We then discuss these interventions in light of resulting spatial patterns of exposure and spatial equity that is households' assessment of their own exposure to air pollution relative to their responsibility for the exposure of others depending on their spatial location within the city. Our results show that, when equity is also a concern, compensations are needed from households who live in the periphery and our simulations suggest that a cordon toll can then achieve a more balanced outcome.
Urban green space (UGS) provision across cities is often assessed from per capita quantities. However these aggregate measures say little about the actual use of UGS because they ignore the relative ...location of UGS and citizens. Spatial accessibility approaches consider this relative location but mostly assume that benefits happen within close proximity of residences. We challenge this assumption for three European cities comparatively, based on similarly acquired survey data. We study which factors influence how far people travel to their most used UGS, as defined by users themselves. We find that travelled distances (1.4–1.9 km) and inter-city differences are surprisingly high compared to the few hundred meters set in policy targets and accessibility analyses. We identify socio-demographic effects and a role for perceived rather than objective quality of local UGS. More than a spatial interaction trade-off between proximity and size, our results suggest that UGS visits are part of a more complex set of activities, further away from residences and with a diversity of sizes and proximities. Our results call for a re-evaluation of UGS analytical practices and provision policies beyond aggregate and accessibility perspectives, towards multi-scalar and spatially varying measures.
•Distances travelled to the most used green space far exceed accessibility recommendations.•Age, occupational status, education and nationality have key effects on distances travelled.•Urban green space size and their provision in proximity seldom impact the distance travelled.•Perception of local green space provision matters more than objective measures of the provision.•Large variations across our 3 cities call for further comparative research.
•Influence of urban structures from an environmental, health and social perspective.•Focus: emission/ exposure trade-offs due to urban structures and residential choice.•Green spaces in the centre ...and a shift towards public transport most beneficial.•Compaction policies increase residents’ exposure to pollutants and reduce utility.•We find stronger impacts of local designs than global land use or transport options.
Air pollution is a major concern in urban areas worldwide. The interplay between urban structure and air pollution from an environmental, health and social perspective is the focus of our work: we model how urban structure impacts traffic-induced pollutant emissions and the exposure of residents to those pollutants.
We present a chain of models applied to theoretical monocentric space: a residential choice model with endogenous open-space and road network, a commuting traffic generation and road assignment model and a pollutant emissions, dispersion and exposure model. The theoretical study approach decouples results from location specific characteristics and enables us to analyse how the preference of households for green amenities, a transport tax, the provision of public transport alternatives and local neighbourhood design impact the environment (total emissions) as well as residents’ health (population exposure) and utility.
We emphasise that environmental strategies in the form of urban compaction have a strong impact on the exposure of households to pollutants, especially close to the centre, in addition to their reduction of welfare. Our results suggest that more beneficial policy outcomes can be obtained from strategies which preserve green spaces close to the centre or which intend a greater shift from car to public transport. Further, we find indication that different local designs of neighbourhoods have much stronger impacts on the exposure–emission tension than city-wide land use or transport options.
The increasing attractiveness of Luxembourg as a place to work and live puts its land use and transport systems under high pressure. Understanding how the country can accommodate residential growth ...and additional traffic in a sustainable manner is a key and difficult challenge that requires a policy relevant, flexible and responsive modelling framework. We describe the first fully fledged land-use and transport interaction framework (MOEBIUS) applied to the whole of Luxembourg. We stress its multi-scalar nature and detail the articulation of two of its main components: a dynamic demographic microsimulation at the scale of individuals and a micro-spatial scale simulation of residential choice. Conversely to traditional zone-based approaches, the framework keeps full details of households and individuals for residential and travel mode choice, making the model highly consistent with theory. In addition, results and policy constraints are implemented at a very fine resolution (20m) and can thus incorporate local effects (residential externalities, local urban design). Conversely to fully disaggregated approaches, a linkage is organized at an intermediate scale, which allows (1) simplifying the generation and spatial distribution of trips, (2) parallelizing parts of the residential choice simulation, and (3) ensuring a good calibration of the population and real estate market estimates. We show model outputs for different scenarios at the horizon 2030 and compare them along sustainability criteria.
The behavioural ecological approach to anthropology states that the density and distribution of resources determines optimal patterns of resource use and also sets its constraints to grouping, ...mobility and settlement choice. Central place foraging (CPF) models have been used for analyzing foraging behaviours of hunter-gatherers and drawing a causal link from the volume of available resources in the environment to the mobility decisions of hunter-gatherers. In this study, we propose a spatially explicit agent-based CPF model. We explore its potential for explaining the formation of settlement patterns and test its robustness to the configuration of space. Building on a model assuming homogeneous energy distributions, we had to add several new parameters and an adaptation mechanism for foragers to predict the length of their stay, together with a heterogeneous environment configuration. The validation of the model shows that the spatially explicit CPF is generally robust to spatial configuration of energy resources. The total volume of energy has a significant effect on constraining sedentism as predicted by aspatial model and thus can be used on different environmental conditions. Still the spatial autocorrelation of resource distribution has a linear effect on optimal mobility decisions and needs to be considered in predictive models. The effect on settlement location choice is not substantial and is more determined by other characteristics of settlement location. This limits the CPF models in analyzing settlement pattern formation processes.
The papers included in this special issue of the EJTIR evolved from discussions and presentations given at the 2013 Transport Research Day of BIVEC, the ‘Benelux Interuniversity Association of ...Transport Researchers’, which took place at the University of Luxembourg in May 2013. This biannual event is organized in order to foster scientific exchange on related issues and offers a platform for early career researchers, most importantly PhD candidates, to present their work and receive scientific feedback. Different from the topic-wise rationale that is usually behind most other academic associations, submissions have to come from universities or representatives of the three Benelux countries: Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.
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