Integrated Assessment of Health Benefits and Burdens of Urban Greenspace Designs

Abstract

Spatial planners are nowadays strongly interested in the benefits of greenspace for the health of urban residents. However, concrete and context-specific guidance on effective greening strategies is still lacking. We present a novel, model-based approach to support the development of such strategies. The approach is quantitative and spatially-explicit, and accounts for multiple health benefits as well as burdens. In this study, we applied the approach to the city of Maastricht (The Netherlands), and conducted an integrated, city-scale assessment of the health benefits and burdens of four urban greenspace designs. These included: ‘No greenspace’, ‘Current greenspace’, ‘Green parking lots and squares’, and ‘Optimized greenspace locations’. For each greenspace design, indicator values were calculated for five health determinants: heat stress, air pollution, perceived unsafety, unattractive views, and tick-bite risk. To assess the health contribution of urban greenspace in a given design, these indicator values were compared with the values in the ‘No greenspace’ design. The study produced clear, quantitative conclusions about the health benefits and burdens of the urban greenspace designs for the case of Maastricht, but also generated novel, more general insights relevant to planning of urban greenspace for health. These insights concern the importance of translating health policy objectives into specific target values or thresholds, and the importance of ‘smart’ choices in greenspace type and location that can effectively reduce trade-offs between health benefits and burdens. Priorities for future research, addressing limitations of the presented approach, concern a further expansion of the range of health benefits and burdens covered by the model, and the development of a common metric for the entire range of health benefits and burdens allowing optimization of greenspace design to maximize its overall net health benefit.