Assessment of urban green space structures and their quality from a multidimensional perspective

Facing the growing amount of people living in cities and, at the same time, the need for a compact and sustainable urban development to mitigate urban sprawl, it becomes increasingly important that green spaces in compact cities are designed to meet the various needs within an urban environment. Urban green spaces have a multitude of functions: Maintaining ecological processes and resulting services, e.g. providing habitat for animals and plants, providing a beneficial city microclimate as well as recreational space for citizens. Regarding these requirements, currently existing assessment procedures for green spaces have some major shortcomings, which are discussed in this paper. It is argued why a more detailed spatial level as well as a distinction between natural and artificial varieties of structural elements is justified and needed and how the assessment of urban green spaces benefits from the multidimensional perspective that is applied. By analyzing a selection of structural elements from an ecological, microclimatic and social perspective, indicator values are derived and a new, holistic metrics¹ is proposed. The results of the integrated analysis led to two major findings: first, that for some elements, the evaluation differs to a great extent between the different perspectives (disciplines) and second, that natural and artificial varieties are, in most cases, evaluated considerably different from each other. The differences between the perspectives call for an integrative planning policy which acknowledges the varying contribution of a structural element to different purposes (ecological, microclimatic, social) as well as a discussion about the prioritization of those purposes. The differences in the evaluation of natural vs. artificial elements verify the assumption that indicators which consider only generic elements fail to account for those refinements and are thus less suitable for planning and assessment purposes. Implications, challenges and scenarios for the application of such a metrics are finally discussed.