top of page
Writer's pictureFelix Myrie

Urban Green Spaces: A Review

As cities have evolved, the desire to move out to suburbs and rural areas, which are less sustainable than urban areas, has remained or even intensified. People long to escape the ‘big smoke’ of cities, even as air quality has improved, and one of the main reasons for that is the absence of green space in many cities. Almost everyone loves to be around nature, and this is reflected in the disparity in house prices between areas that have access to parks and those that don’t. To make cities more livable and attractive, we should address these issues by creating urban green spaces.


Urban green spaces have a wide range of positive impacts on the people who live close to them, like reducing the prevalence of type 2 diabetes and other medical conditions, and improving the memory, attentiveness and learning ability of children and young people, according to the European Environment Agency.

Image from EEA: Under CC-BY license


They provide an accessible space in communities for exercise, recreation and social interaction, improving social cohesion and giving the local area something to be proud of. Also, they improve localised air quality, which means that conditions like asthma are less common in areas surrounding green spaces. And, in case the case for green spaces was not overwhelming enough as it was, they also cost very little for the amount of good they deliver: analysis from the City of London Corporation found that every £1 spent on maintaining their urban parks delivered £87.70 in societal benefits. 

But, creating urban green spaces in dense urban areas seems impossible. Surely, there is no way that property developers would choose to use valuable real estate for something as frivolous, in the eyes of a shareholder, as a community space, right?


Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay present an attractive counterargument to this. The development, while funded in part by the national government, is able to serve an important role as a city park in the space-constrained citystate, being free to access for locals, while generating a healthy profit for the company that manages it, through tourist visits and events like music festivals.

 Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay - Wikimedia Commons


While a large-scale natural park, surrounded by a planned ‘car-lite high density residential district’ may sound like something from the wildest imagination of an urbanist in North America, we don’t need S$1 billion (about US$750 million) in public funding to create truly transformative green spaces.


In New York, a more affordable and duplicable urban green space was able to have a similarly uplifting effect, as a disused railway viaduct in the West of Manhattan was converted into a linear park, which flourished as a home for flora and a respite from urban life. The space now plays host to small-scale events for the local community, as well as attracting millions of visitors per year. As well as helping to regenerate its surroundings, this groundbreaking urban green space inspired similar developments like the Castlefield Viaduct in Manchester, United Kingdom, and the organisation that planned it founded the High Line Network to support similar projects in other cities. Rather than demolishing disused infrastructure, this has shown that we should look at it as a ‘low-hanging fruit’ in terms of opportunities for green spaces.

 

As the need for urban green spaces is clear, and their creation is viable even in cities without the deepest pockets and most willing governments, we should try to create more urban green spaces. If you live in an urban area, you could look for and support projects developing urban green spaces in your area (check out the High Line Network for projects in the US and Canada), or start your own. We can have a great impact on our cities, and leave a lasting legacy in them, by creating and supporting urban green spaces.



10 views0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

Comentarios


bottom of page