Urban Green Space in Shrinking Cities

Urban green spaces (UGS) are essential in improving residents’ health and achieving equitable urban development, particularly in shrinking cities. Shrinking cities represent a critical challenge for contemporary urban societies, necessitating concerted efforts to restore vitality and mitigate the adverse social, economic, and environmental impacts of urban shrinkage. While previous research has explored UGS and urban regeneration, it has largely relied on cross-sectional data, overlooking temporal changes and the prevalence of underutilized parks in North America.

This study addresses these gaps by examining Pittsburgh, a city experiencing severe urban shrinkage. Machine learning methods are employed to analyze satellite imagery from 2019 to 2022, assessing changes in UGS‘s distribution, area, and morphology. Additionally, we used census tract (CT) fine-grained access data to observe whether green spaces in the city are visited, and utilized ordinary least squares (OLS) and Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) to explore how UGS influences the vitality of shrinking communities. The study found that: (1) Larger UGS within CTs are associated with higher community visitation rates, while larger UGS in the surrounding 500-meter radius result in decreased visitation. (2) Land use type is associated with UGS utilization, with smaller UGS areas in CBD being more intensively used compared to larger, underutilized UGS around low-density facilities like hospitals and schools. Our findings underscore the importance of considering both the quality and quantity of UGS in urban planning, particularly in the context of urban shrinkage.

This paper has been accepted and presented at ACSP 2024 at Seattle, WA. And it is now under review ar Urban Forestry & Urban Greening.