Understanding the recovery of urban public green space in the urban center and coastal areas in relation to policy and accessibility: a case study from Hangzhou, China

Urban public green space play a critical role in enhancing human well-being and urban quality of life. The temporal and spatial patterns in urban public green space in Hangzhou, China was analyzed from the Landsat TM images of... [ view full abstract ]

Urban public green space play a critical role in enhancing human well-being and urban quality of life. The temporal and spatial patterns in urban public green space in Hangzhou, China was analyzed from the Landsat TM images of two different years (2002 and 2013). The green space has experienced a drastic change that loss of green space mainly occurred on the edge of the built up area, with a severer degree and range between 2002 and 2013. By contrast, green space in the urban center and coastal areas showed a recovery. Understanding the recovery of urban public green space in the urban center and coastal areas in relation to policy and accessibility can provide essential references for urban planning. This paper employs spatial regression to examine the recovered urban public green space in the urban center and coastal areas in association with the policy and accessibility. The GWR regression was used to model the relationship between the recovered public green space and 12 spatial, demographic, and landscape factors. Results show that good accessibility sped up the recovery of public green space in the urban center, especially the factor of distance from roads seemed to have a strong influence on urban public green space changes. In addition, urban public green space policy issued by the local government improved the recovery of green space. The alliterating green space change trajectories in this study demonstrated a rather complicated changing pattern from 2002 to 2013, implying the existence of spatial dependence and temporal dependence in the changing process. This study informs urban planners of the urban public green space provision across space.