Planning City Green Space Locations For Public Access: A Capacitated Location-Allocation Modeling Approach

Li, Xiaoling

Planning City Green Space Locations For Public Access: A Capacitated Location-Allocation Modeling Approach

Abstract

Green spaces help build healthy communities and bring various social benefits for the public. In order to ensure the wellness of greening of cities, some space standards such as green space coverage and the average area of green space per person are widely adopted in green space location planning, and they were also widely accepted as indices for cross-city comparisons. However, using these standards alone ignores the fact that both green spaces and population are unevenly distributed in cities. And many cities do not have enough green spaces at adequate locations for public access. Using a real city as an example, this study presents a capacitated location-allocation modeling approach for planners and policy-makers to incorporate existing green space planning standards into location models to evaluate existing green spaces and select potential green space locations to meet public recreation needs. This approach is to find the locations of green spaces among all candidate sites which minimize the cost of green space construction, or in other words, to build the minimum amount of new green space area and make the best use of existing green spaces, such that the proportion of the population that can each share a certain amount of green space within standard catchment distance can meet green space service percent coverage standard. The author addresses the problem of applying some space standards directly into the models and points out that these standards have to be adjusted for feasible solutions. Taking the study case for example, the average green space area per person is much higher than 15m2, but when uneven distributions of population were considered, the average accessible green space area per person is less than 5m2. Given the uncertainty of such planning standards as part of the model inputs, multiple model results with the various parameter inputs were generated. Finally an integration approach of these model results was proposed for the purpose of green space plan implementation: the green spaces in the solutions were classified into different groups according to their relative contributions to serve the demands, and different implementation strategies were suggested for each green space group.

Date Issued

2014-08-18

Keywords

green space; LOCATION-ALLOCATION; GIS

Committee Chair

Donaghy, Kieran Patrick

Committee Member

DeGloria, Stephen Daniel
Francis, Joe Douglas

Degree Discipline

City and Regional Planning

Degree Name

Ph. D., City and Regional Planning

Degree Level

Doctor of Philosophy

Types

dissertation or thesis