Understanding urban green space dynamics

Rapid urbanisation is reshaping cities across the globe. This is having a detrimental effect on many green spaces, such as parks, urban forests, green corridors, and landscaped public areas. Ultimately, these changes represent a loss of ecological and social benefits, such as helping moderate temperatures, improve air quality, manage stormwater, support biodiversity, and contribute to the wellbeing of city dwellers.

Of course, as people head for the cities, housing, infrastructure, and commercial development must change to accommodate their needs. Understanding how urbanisation and the loss of green spaces affect the city’s sustainability is high on the agenda for urban planners and environmental scientists.

A study in the International Journal of Environment and Sustainable Development has looked at one of the limitations of earlier research: the reliance on a static assessment of those urban green spaces. Conventional approaches capture conditions at a single moment in time or compare only a few snapshots, and this does not reflect the complex and dynamic nature of urban landscapes. In reality, green spaces expand, contract, and shift unevenly across neighbourhoods and time periods. This makes it difficult to home in on the causes and consequences of change.

To tackle this problem, the researchers have turned to advanced spatiotemporal analytical methods. Spatiotemporal refers to the combined study of where and when changes occur. An algorithm then detects clusters within the complex shifting datasets and identifies hotspots where green space coverage changed significantly and areas where landscapes became increasingly fragmented.

The team then used a second layer of analysis to understand the underlying causes. They used a geographically and temporally weighted regression model, which considers how population growth, development intensity, land-use policy, and other factors vary across locations and over time. Their approach could then link changes in landscape structure directly to the degradation of the ecological “services” provided by those urban green spaces and point to how urban planning might be used to remedy the problem by countering the losses.

Ouyang, L., He, Y., Chen, Z. and He, K. (2026) ‘Dynamic monitoring and evolution of urban green space landscape sustainability based on spatiotemporal analysis algorithm’, Int. J. Environment and Sustainable Development, Vol. 25, No. 5, pp.3–23.