Neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage and urban public green spaces availability: A localized modeling approach to inform land use policy

Urban public green spaces (UPGSs) are rarely uniformly distributed across space. A subset of urban population is disproportionately well available of UPGSs, while other residents have considerably limited accessibility to UPGSs. Communicating and examining the spatial heterogeneity in UPGSs availability can formulate better land use policy. This paper applies the geographically weighted regression (GWR) to analyze the locality-specific relationships between neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage and UPGSs availability at district level in Shanghai, China. In particular, we construct a neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage index (NSDI) that incorporates elements from four dimensions including wealth, occupation, education and housing. Three domains of indicators (abundance, quality and accessibility) are developed to measure UPGSs. Results show that relationships between NSDI and UPGSs availability indicators present significant spatial non-stationarity. In general, UPGSs abundance and accessibility are lower in districts characterized by higher NSDI. However, converse trend is found in districts on the southwestern urban edge. UPGSs quality is poorer in districts with higher socioeconomic disadvantage within the central city, while UPGSs in the socioeconomically disadvantaged exhibit better quality within the outskirts. Our results highlight the importance of considering the locality-specific neighborhood socioeconomic profiles of UPGSs availability. The applied GWR framework presents promising potential for better UPGSs planning in a policy context. In the future, two principles are required for urban greening policies: (1) a comprehensive perspective in UPGSs availability evaluation; (2) locality-specific target strategies. The principles are not only key for China but also relevant to other nations who wish to achieve successful urban greening.