Measuring Community Green Inequity: A Fine-Scale Assessment of Beijing Urban Area

Urban Farm DB summary

A study noting that although exposure to green space benefits residents' physical and mental health, its spatial distribution is inequitable, and that existing green equity studies typically rely on administrative units, a macro-scale approach that overlooks the fine-scale green spaces (such as community gardens and lawns) residents encounter most often, risking biased estimates. Using the community as the unit of analysis, the study drew on three types of green-space data - fine-scale green spaces within communities, surrounding large-scale parks, and streetscape imagery - and applied a proposed set of 11 metrics across morphology, visibility, and accessibility to 4,544 communities in urban Beijing. Through spatial visualization, spatial clustering, radar plots, and correlation analysis, the study found large differences and complementary relationships between metric categories, similarities within the same category, and confirmed inequity in green space across regions of the city as urbanization proceeds.