Changes of Urban Greenspace Coverage and Exposure in China

Abstract

Urban greenspace, as an essential component of green infrastructure, is particularly important in the urban environment that maintains the function and sustainability of urbanities. With the rapid economic growth over recent decades, China has been experiencing unprecedented urbanisation processes, at the same time, led to dramatic changes in urban land use and living environment. Therefore, understanding the spatiotemporal changes of urban greenspace coverage and how they impact on population’s exposure to urban greenspace is a critical requirement for supporting urban planning and healthy city development. Although a number of studies have attempted to evaluate urban greenspace changes in China, a comprehensive and multidimensional assessment of urban greenspace coverage and exposure is still lacking. Meanwhile, the emerging geospatial big data provides unique opportunities to quantify the interaction between human activities and the green environment, which has been limitedly addressed. In this chapter, we retrospect some of our recent works on leveraging multi-source remote sensing and social big data to estimate the dynamics of greenspace coverage and exposure change for Chinese large cities. The expected findings will advance our understanding of the following questions in a more systematic way: (1) What is the spatiotemporal pattern of greenspace changes over the past two decades? (2) What is the temporal dynamic and heterogeneity in greenspace exposure? (3) How does urban expansion impact on greenspace exposure experience? (4) Are there any inequalities in greenspace exposure among Chinese cities?