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The Incremental Demise of Urban Green Spaces
Open accessAbstract
More precise explanations are needed to better understand why public green spaces are diminishing in cities, leading to the loss of ecosystem services that humans receive from natural systems. This paper is devoted to the incremental change of green spaces—a fate that is largely undetectable by urban residents. The paper elucidates a set of drivers resulting in the subtle loss of urban green spaces and elaborates on the consequences of this for resilience planning of ecosystem services. Incremental changes of greenspace trigger baseline shifts, where each generation of humans tends to take the current condition of an ecosystem as the normal state, disregarding its previous states. Even well-intended political land-use decisions, such as current privatization schemes, can cumulatively result in undesirable societal outcomes, leading to a gradual loss of opportunities for nature experience. Alfred E. Kahn referred to such decision making as ‘the tyranny of small decisions.’ This is mirrored in urban planning as problems that are dealt with in an ad hoc manner with no officially formulated vision for long-term spatial planning. Urban common property systems could provide interim solutions for local governments to survive periods of fiscal shortfalls. Transfer of proprietor rights to civil society groups can enhance the resilience of ecosystem services in cities.
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“Smart cities and sustainable cities are divergent on many aspects and hence not necessarily synonymous with each other”
From Environmentally sustainable smart cities and their converging AI, IoT, and big data technologies and solutions: an integrated approach to an extensive literature review (2023) · cites this paper as Colding et al. 2020
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Metadata
- Authors
- Colding, J., Gren, Å., & Barthel, S.
- Affiliations
- Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (SE)
- Stockholm Resilience Centre (SE)
- Corresponding author
- Colding, Johan
- Venue
- Land
- Publisher
- MDPI AG
- Published
- 2020-05-20
- Volume
- 9
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 162
- ISSN
- 2073-445X (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W3028489775
- Cited by
- 126
- References
- 64
- Citations by year
- 2026: 14 · 2025: 21 · 2024: 25 · 2023: 22 · 2022: 22 · 2021: 18 · 2020: 4
- FWCI
- 6.14
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- dx.doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Land (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- KTH Publication Database DiVA (KTH Royal Institute of Technology) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Funders
- Svenska Forskningsrådet Formas (2017-00937, 2016-01193)
- Stockholm County Council and the Stockholm University (SU-SLL Grant 2017: no. 20160884)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Global and Planetary Change › Land Use and Ecosystem Services
- Social Sciences › Urban Studies › Urban Green Space and Health
- Social Sciences › Urban Studies › Urban Planning and Governance
- Keywords
- urban green space, incremental change, ecosystem services, baseline shift, urban planning, resilience planning, nature experience, civil society organizations, urban commons
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