Interactive Walkable Floor Maps (IWFs)

The poster provides information on the design of Interactive Walkable Floor Maps (IWFs) and their use in education and governance within the REGREEN project

A European-Chinese exploration. Part 2 - Urban ecosystem service patterns, processes, and contributions to environmental equity under different scenarios

Urban expansion and ecological restoration policies can simultaneously affect land-cover changes and further affect ecosystem services (ES). However, it is unclear whether and to what extent the distribution and equity of urban ES are influenced by the stage of urban development and government policies. This study aims to assess the quantity and equity of ES under different scenarios in cites of China and Europe. Firstly, we used the Conversion of Land Use and its Effects at Small regional extent (CLUE-S) model to simulate future land cover under three scenarios: business-as-usual (BAU), a market-liberal scenario (MLS), and an ecological protection scenario (EPS). Then using ecosystem service model approaches and the landscape analysis, the dynamics of green infrastructure (GI) fraction and connectivity, carbon sequestration, and PM2.5 removal were further evaluated. The results show that: (1) over the past 20 years, Chinese cities have experienced dramatic changes in land cover and ES relative to European cities. (2) Two metropolises in China, Shanghai and Beijing have experienced an increase in the fraction and connectivity of GI and ES in the long-term built-up areas between 2010 and 2020. (3) EPS scenarios are not only effective in increasing the quantity of ES but also in improving the equity of ES distribution. The proposed framework as well as the results may provide important guidance for future urban planning and sustainable city development

Combining spatial and temporal data to create a fine-resolution daily urban air temperature product from remote sensing land surface temperature (LST) data

Remotely sensed land surface temperature (LST) is often used as a proxy for air temperature in urban heat island studies, particularly to illustrate relative temperature differences between locations. Two sensors are used predominantly in the literature, Landsat and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS). However, each has shortcomings that currently limit its utility for many urban applications. Landsat has high spatial resolution but low temporal resolution, and may miss hot days, while MODIS has high temporal resolution but low spatial resolution, which is inadequate to represent the fine grain heterogeneity in cities. In this paper, we overcome this inadequacy by combining high spatial frequency Environmental Services (ES), Landsat-driven Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), and MODIS low spatial frequency background LST at different spatial frequency bands (spatial spectral composition). The method is able to provide fine scale LST four times daily on any day of the year. Using data from Paris in 2019 we show that (1) daytime cooling by vegetation reaches a maximum of 30 °C, above which there is no further increase in cooling. In addition, (2) the cooling is relatively local and does not extend further than 200 m beyond the boundary of the NBS. This model can be used to quantify the benefits of NBS in providing cooling in cities

Naturbasierte Lösungen zur Stärkung der Resilienz in Städten

Chapter 10 (in German). Als naturbasierte Lösungen (NBL) werden auf EU-Ebene naturbezogene Ansätze bezeichnet, die als Instrumente zur Bewältigung gesellschaftlicher Herausforderungen hinsichtlich des Klimawandels dienen. Eine Stadt erhöht ihre Resilienz, wenn ihre NBL-Ansätze auch soziale Probleme und das Wohlergehen der Bürger*innen ansprechen. Dieser Beitrag ist der beispielhaften Anwendung von NBL in drei europäischen Städten unterschiedlicher Größe gewidmet: einer Megacity (Region Paris, Frankreich), einer mittelgroßen Stadt (Aarhus, Dänemark) und einer Kleinstadt (Velika Gorica, Kroatien). Dabei wird untersucht, welche Herausforderungen und Chancen bei der Anwendung von NBL in verschiedenen sozialen und ökologischen Systemen auftreten und inwiefern NBL ein Schlüssel zur städtischen Resilienz sind

Opportunities and constraints of implementing the 3-30-300 rule for urban greening

Urbanisation and climate change have increased the need for equitable access and visibility of urban green and blue spaces (GBS), to promote the sustainability and resilience of cities and to improve the well-being of their inhabitants. In this paper, we test an implementation of the newly proposed guideline to achieve equitable greening, the 3-30-300 rule, in three European cities: Paris Region (France), Aarhus Municipality (Denmark), and Grad Velika Gorica (Croatia). In this analysis, every residential building should have at least three viewable trees, 30% neighbourhood GBS cover, and a GBS of at least 1 hectare within 300 m. Our results show that none of the cities currently meet any of these three components, and the three cities differed in which rules were most closely met. In our implementation, substantial changes were needed in all cities to meet the guidelines: 12.6% of Paris, 10% of Aarhus, and 18.4% of Velika Gorica’s urban footprint were converted to grass or tree cover, with implications for >100,000 buildings and >900,000 inhabitants. Our study discusses how existing conditions in each city impacted the viability of meeting the rule and proposes key considerations for future implementations of such guidelines, drawing on examples of innovative GBS already implemented globally

Land use / Land cover for Leipzig, Germany, for 2012 by an object-based image analysis (OBIA)

Mapping urban structures is a vital prerequisite for urban planners to enhance their databases for liveable cities dedicated to sustainable development. Therefore, it is important to measure urban grey and green structures at the scale of local districts to understand the urban structure and residential needs for urban ecosystem services. Our detailed analysis incorporates digital orthophotos (DOP), LiDAR data and vital statistics. We used remote sensing techniques to create an Object-based Image Analysis (OBIA) that differentiates grey and green structures with high precision and at a refined scale. This spatial information is linked with allocated population and health-related indicators to identify building types with the highest population densities and local districts lacking in different green structures. Our results show the share of built-up structures and the contribution of green structures to urban ecosystem services, human health and well-being at the local district level

Brachflächen in Stadtentwicklung und kommunalen Planungen am Beispiel der Städte Leipzig und Stuttgart

Die vorliegende Studie befasst sich mit Brachflächen im Kontext von Stadtentwicklungsprozessen; an je einem Beispiel soll untersucht werden, wie mit Brachflächen in Großstädten mit unterschiedlicher Entwicklungsdynamik ‚umgegangen’ wird. Zwei Fragestellungen werden untersucht. Zum einen interessiert, welche Handlungsmöglichkeiten Großstädte im Umgang mit Brachflächen nutzen. Hierbei werden sowohl gesamtstädtische Planungen - Stadtentwicklungsplanung, Flächennutzungs- und Landschaftsplanung - als auch das städtische Brachflächenmanagement einbezogen. Zum anderen wird untersucht, inwieweit sich der Umgang mit Brachflächen zwischen wirtschaftlich prosperierenden („wachsenden“) Städten und Städten ohne bzw. mit geringem Wachstum unterscheidet. Arbeitshypothese ist, dass es grundlegende Unterschiede im Umgang mit Brachflächen zwischen beiden Typen von Städten gibt. Im Speziellen werden die Städte Leipzig und Stuttgart miteinander verglichen, weil beide Städte hinsichtlich ihrer Flächengröße und Bevölkerungszahl vergleichbar sind, bezüglich ihrer stadtentwicklungsbezogenen Rahmenbedingungen und ihrer Wachstumsdynamik jedoch große Unterschiede aufweisen. Von Repräsentativität wird zwar nicht ausgegangen; Leipzig und Stuttgart werden jedoch als gute Beispiele für Städte mit unterschiedlicher Historie und Entwicklungsdynamik angesehen. Um Brachflächen vor dem Hintergrund des wirtschaftlichen und demographischen Kontexts der beiden Städte behandeln zu können, werden in Kapitel 2 zunächst Rahmenbedingungen der Stadtentwicklung in Leipzig und Stuttgart umrissen. Die Brachflächensituation (Flächenanteile, Verteilung im Stadtgebiet) sowie Ziele und Nutzungsinteressen bei der Brachflächenentwicklung der beiden Städte werden in Kapitel 3 dargestellt. In den Kapiteln 4 und 5 wird die Integration der Brachflächenthematik in die räumlichen Planungen beider Städte und die jeweiligen Instrumente zum Brachflächenmanagement beschrieben sowie auf Hemmnisse bei der Entwicklung von Brachflächen eingegangen. Ein Vergleich der in den vorangegangenen beiden Kapiteln dargelegten Ergebnisse folgt in Kapitel 6. Abschließend werden die Ergebnisse der Studie zusammengefasst sowie sich daraus ableitbare Handlungsoptionen für andere Städte aufgezeigt

Integrated Mapping of Spatial Urban Dynamics—A European-Chinese Exploration. Part 1—Methodology for Automatic Land Cover Classification Tailored towards Spatial Allocation of Ecosystem Services Features

Urbanisation processes inherently influence land cover (LC) and have dramatic impacts on the amount, distribution and quality of vegetation cover. The latter are the source of ecosystem services (ES) on which humans depend. However, the temporal and thematical dimensions are not documented in a comparable manner across Europe and China. Three cities in China and three cities in Europe were selected as case study areas to gain a picture of spatial urban dynamics at intercontinental scale. First, we analysed available global and continental thematic LC products as a data pool for sample selection and referencing our own mapping model. With the help of the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform and earth observation data, an automatic LC mapping method tailored for more detailed ES features was proposed. To do so, differentiated LC categories were quantified. In order to obtain a balance between efficiency and high classification accuracy, we developed an optimal classification model by evaluating the importance of a large number of spectral, texture-based indices and topographical information. The overall classification accuracies range between 73% and 95% for different time slots and cities. To capture ES related LC categories in great detail, deciduous and coniferous forests, cropland, grassland and bare land were effectively identified. To understand inner urban options for potential new ES, dense and dispersed built-up areas were differentiated with good results. In addition, this study focuses on the differences in the characteristics of urban expansion witnessed in China and Europe. Our results reveal that urbanisation has been more intense in the three Chinese cities than in the three European cities, with an 84% increase in the entire built-up area over the last two decades. However, our results also show the results of China’s ecological restoration policies, with a total of 963 km2 of new green and blue LC created in the last two decades. We proved that our automatic mapping can be effectively applied to future studies, and the monitoring results will be useful for consecutive ES analyses aimed at achieving more environmentally friendly cities