Urban green spaces accessibility in two European cities: Vilnius (Lithuania) and Coimbra (Portugal)^☆

Abstract

Urban green spaces (UGS) are essential for human well-being, contributing towards quality of life and promoting social interactions and inclusion. Accessibility to recreational UGS is key to human well-being in urban areas. However, there is a lack of works focused on recreational UGS accessibility in cities from different countries, using different types of transport. In this work, we studied the accessibility to recreational UGS in Vilnius (Lithuania) and Coimbra (Portugal) through four transport modes (foot, bike, bus and car) within 5- and 10-minute distance. The results showed important differences between cities. Vilnius had higher accessibility to recreational UGS than Coimbra in all transport modes. In both cities, the accessibility was highest by car and lowest by bus. Also, the percentage of population covered by 5- and 10-minute distance UGS accessibility in Vilnius is higher than in Coimbra, despite the lower population density in Vilnius. A large number of recreational UGS, their geographic distribution, the dispersed population pattern, and the location of several urbanizations near recreational UGS increased the inhabitant’s accessibility to recreational UGS in Vilnius. The differences in accessibility between cities were mainly attributed to the large number of recreational UGS and higher road network density, cycleways and footways density, and bus lines in Vilnius, compared to Coimbra. This work identified the areas where recreational UGS accessibility is difficult in using different transport modes and need to be improved in study areas. This is essential to support urban planners and increase cities’ well-being. The findings of this work will be important for the management of the studied urban areas.

Keywords

Recreational UGS / Accessibility / Transport modes / Urban planning / Well-being

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This research was Funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), through the PhD grant SFRH/BD/149710/2019. We appreciate to Wenwu Zhao for the deep and insightful comments to this manuscript.

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi: 10.1016/j.geosus.2022.03.001.

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