Investigating the Role of Green Infrastructure on Urban WaterLogging: Evidence from Metropolitan Coastal Cities

Urban green infrastructures (UGI) can effectively reduce surface runoff, thereby alleviating the pressure of urban waterlogging. Due to the shortage of land resources in metropolitan areas, it is necessary to understand how to utilize the limited UGI area to maximize the waterlogging mitigation function. Less attention, however, has been paid to investigating the threshold level of waterlogging mitigation capacity. Additionally, various studies mainly focused on the individual effects of UGI factors on waterlogging but neglected the interactive effects between these factors. To overcome this limitation, two waterlogging high-risk coastal cities—Guangzhou and Shenzhen, are selected to examine the effectiveness and stability of UGI in alleviating urban waterlogging. The results indicate that the impact of green infrastructure on urban waterlogging largely depends on its area and biophysical parameter. Healthier or denser vegetation (superior ecological environment) can more effectively intercept and store rainwater runoff. This suggests that while increasing the area of UGI, more attention should be paid to the biophysical parameter of vegetation. Hence, the mitigation effect of green infrastructure would be improved from the “size” and “health”. The interaction of composition and spatial configuration greatly enhances their individual effects on waterlogging. This result underscores the importance of the interactive enhancement effect between UGI composition and spatial configuration. Therefore, it is particularly important to optimize the UGI composition and spatial pattern under limited land resource conditions. Lastly, the effect of green infrastructure on waterlogging presents a threshold phenomenon. The excessive area proportions of UGI within the watershed unit or an oversized UGI patch may lead to a waste of its mitigation effect. Therefore, the area proportion of UGI and its mitigation effect should be considered comprehensively when planning UGI. It is recommended to control the proportion of green infrastructure at the watershed scale (24.4% and 72.1% for Guangzhou and Shenzhen) as well as the area of green infrastructure patches (1.9 ha and 2.8 ha for Guangzhou and Shenzhen) within the threshold level to maximize its mitigation effect. Given the growing concerns of global warming and continued rapid urbanization, these findings provide practical urban waterlogging prevention strategies toward practical implementations.

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The mitigation effect of urban green infrastructure (UGI) on urban waterlogging

10.5194/egusphere-egu21-2514 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Qifei Zhang ◽

Zhifeng Wu ◽

Paolo Tarolli

Keyword(s):

Green Infrastructure ◽

Urban Areas ◽

Spatial Configuration ◽

Water Cycle ◽

Piecewise Linear ◽

Living Environment ◽

Drainage Network ◽

Biophysical Parameters ◽

Positive Role ◽

The Impact

<p>With the acceleration of urbanization, the impervious surfaces of urban areas have increased dramatically, changing the natural water cycle of the city. It is of great significance for the improvement of urban living environment and the risk management of urban waterlogging to fully understand and play the positive role of UGI in alleviating urban waterlogging. This study attempts to identify the critical factors that alleviate urban waterlogging and examine the effectiveness and stability of UGI in mitigating urban waterlogging in multiple locations. We looked at two highly-urbanized Chinese cities (Guangzhou and Shenzhen) in a comparative study. The waterlogging records from 2009 to 2015 were obtained from the local water authority and the UGI was extracted from the 0.5-m resolution remote sensing images. The complex relationship between urban waterlogging and green infrastructure was quantified and compared through partial redundancy analysis and piecewise linear regression after controlling the conditions of topography, precipitation, and drainage network. The results indicated that the spatial distribution of urban waterlogging events presents a strong agglomeration effect, while the clustering pattern varies in different cities. Furthermore, after controlling the impact of elevation, rainfall, and drainage network, the area percentage and biophysical parameters of green infrastructure are the two most important factors to alleviate urban waterlogging. The influence of these two factors on urban waterlogging is consistent in different cities. This result indicates that more attention should be paid to the area size of green infrastructure and its vegetation biophysical parameters to mitigate urban waterlogging magnitude to the greatest extent. However, the area of green infrastructure must be controlled within a certain range in order to play a corresponding role in alleviating urban waterlogging. We also found that the spatial configuration of UGI also matters. Holding UGI&#8217;s composition constant, the degree of urban waterlogging can be reduced by optimizing the spatial configuration of UGI. This finding provides additional insights that the urban waterlogging can be alleviated by balancing the relative composition of UGI as well as by optimizing their spatial configuration, which is particularly important for a highly urbanized area where land resources for UGI are scarce. This study expands our understanding of the complex mechanism of UGI on urban waterlogging mitigation and provides beneficial enlightenment for the design of UGI.</p>

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Urban Design Study of Resilient City in Greater Bay Area

10.47472/rixs1816 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Peijun Lu ◽

◽

Yimin Sun ◽

Bilin Chen ◽

Sheng Xia ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Natural Disasters ◽

Urban Design ◽

Green Infrastructure ◽

Design Stage ◽

Urban Resilience ◽

Rapid Urbanization ◽

Bay Area ◽

Development Framework ◽

The Future ◽

The Impact

With the increasing climate change, the contradiction between the vulnerable natural conditions and rapid urbanization in Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area becomes much more prominent. Urban security is threatened by various severe natural disasters, such as rising sea level, storm surges, and intensified floods, etc. To solve this problem, based on the theory of resilient city, this paper develops three resilient urban design principles: 1) integrated city principle; 2) adaptive technology principle; 3) flexible design principle, and build a research-designfeedback loop pattern. In the research and prediction stage, we quantitatively calculate the influence of natural disasters that may happen in the future in the Greater Bay Area and map the disaster influence in the natural basement layer, urban infrastructure network layer and urban settlement layer by Geographic Information System(GIS) through scenario stimulation. Based on this, the most severely affected areas in the future will be defined as key design areas. In the urban design stage, we focus on one of the key design areas – Pazhou and stimulate multiple scenarios to assess the urban resilient risk. We propose different integrated urban design strategies to balance the urban development and risk, select the adaptive hydraulic engineering technology to realize a more sustainable green infrastructure and build a flexible development framework to face the future uncertainty. In the evaluation and feedback stage, we develop a time series model of heavy rainfall to evaluate urban resilience in different design and quantify the impact of natural disasters through a set of urban resilience indicators in various layers, in order to pick up more resilient design to optimize. The practice experience shows that the resilient city is a long-term process, which requires an interdisciplinary cooperation mode, among research, design and feedback and a great management and control platform and a multi-objective evaluation index system so as to achieve real-time monitoring, regular evaluation, and dynamic control. This study attempts to make up for the lack of resilience city research in planning and design practice, to provide practical experience for the next stage of urban building.

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Eating Out in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Changes in Food and in Social Identities

10.1093/oso/9780198826187.003.0005 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Christel Lane

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Social Identities ◽

Rapid Urbanization ◽

General Terms ◽

Quality Of Food ◽

Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽

Eating Out ◽

Gender And Nation ◽

The Impact

This chapter examines the impact of rapid urbanization and industrialization on food and eating out. It draws attention to the growing standardization of food and, with greater class differentiation, to the growing diversity in eating-out venues. Class, gender, and nation are again used as lenses to understand the different eating-out habits and their symbolic significance. Towards the end of the twentieth century, pubs moved more fully towards embracing dining. However, the quality of food, in general terms, began to improve significantly only towards the end of the century, and hospitality venues also moved towards selling food from diverse national origins.

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The Impact of Urban Recreation Environment on Residents’ Happiness—Based on a Case Study in China

Sustainability ◽

10.3390/su13105549 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 13 (10) ◽

pp. 5549

Author(s):

Lei Kang ◽

Zhaoping Yang ◽

Fang Han

Keyword(s):

Low Income ◽

Subjective Evaluation ◽

Objective Evaluation ◽

Income Group ◽

High Income Group ◽

Rapid Urbanization ◽

Indirect Impact ◽

Negative Effect ◽

The Impact ◽

Urban Recreation

Rapid urbanization promotes the expansion of urban tourism and recreation functions, but it also brings many problems, which affect residents’ happiness. Previous studies have emphasized the direct impact of urban recreation environment on happiness, and few have explored the indirect impact of urban recreation environment on happiness through subjective evaluation. Based on the survey data of nearly 10,000 permanent residents in 40 key tourism cities in China, this paper establishes a theoretical framework of the direct and indirect impact of urban recreation environment on happiness. The objective evaluation of natural recreation environment and sociocultural recreation environment has an important influence on happiness, but the influence of natural recreation environment is greater than that of sociocultural recreation environment. Individual subjective satisfaction with urban recreation environment mediates the relationship between urban objective environment and happiness. Urban parks have a positive effect on happiness, while tourist attractions have a negative effect. The influence of urban location on happiness is nonlinear. The high-income group is more sensitive to the recreation environment, while the low-income group is less sensitive to the recreation environment. These findings provide insights for further improving citizens’ quality of life and designing urban construction in developing countries under the conditions of rapid urbanization.

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Sources of and Control Measures for PTE Pollution in Soil at the Urban Fringe in Weinan, China

Land ◽

10.3390/land10070762 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 10 (7) ◽

pp. 762

Author(s):

Lei Han ◽

Rui Chen ◽

Zhao Liu ◽

Shanshan Chang ◽

Yonghua Zhao ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Land Use ◽

Urban Expansion ◽

Pollution Sources ◽

Urban Fringe ◽

Control Measures ◽

Atomic Fluorescence Spectrometry ◽

Human Beings ◽

Rapid Urbanization ◽

Kriging Interpolation Method ◽

The Impact

The environment of the urban fringe is complex and frangible. With the acceleration of industrialization and urbanization, the urban fringe has become the primary space for urban expansion, and the intense human activities create a high risk of potentially toxic element (PTE) pollution in the soil. In this study, 138 surface soil samples were collected from a region undergoing rapid urbanization and construction—Weinan, China. Concentrations of As, Pb, Cr, Cu, and Ni (Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry, ICP-MS) and Hg (Atomic Fluorescence Spectrometry, AFS) were measured. The Kriging interpolation method was used to create a visualization of the spatial distribution characteristics and to analyze the pollution sources of PTEs in the soil. The pollution status of PTEs in the soil was evaluated using the national environmental quality standards for soils in different types of land use. The results show that the content range of As fluctuated a small amount and the coefficient of variation is small and mainly comes from natural soil formation. The content of Cr, Cu, and Ni around the automobile repair factory, the prefabrication factory, and the building material factory increased due to the deposition of wear particles in the soil. A total of 13.99% of the land in the study area had Hg pollution, which was mainly distributed on category 1 development land and farmland. Chemical plants were the main pollution sources. The study area should strictly control the industrial pollution emissions, regulate the agricultural production, adjust the land use planning, and reduce the impact of pollution on human beings. Furthermore, we make targeted remediation suggestions for each specific land use type. These results are of theoretical significance, will be of practical value for the control of PTEs in soil, and will provide ecological environmental protection in the urban fringe throughout the urbanization process.

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Review on Urban Heat Island in China: Methods, Its Impact on Buildings Energy Demand and Mitigation Strategies

Sustainability ◽

10.3390/su13020762 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 13 (2) ◽

pp. 762

Author(s):

Liu Tian ◽

Yongcai Li ◽

Jun Lu ◽

Jue Wang

Keyword(s):

Energy Consumption ◽

Urban Heat Island ◽

Building Energy ◽

Design Stage ◽

Heat Island ◽

Building Energy Consumption ◽

Rapid Urbanization ◽

Substantial Impact ◽

Urban Heat ◽

The Impact

High population density, dense high-rise buildings, and impervious pavements increase the vulnerability of cities, which aggravate the urban climate environment characterized by the urban heat island (UHI) effect. Cities in China provide unique information on the UHI phenomenon because they have experienced rapid urbanization and dramatic economic development, which have had a great influence on the climate in recent decades. This paper provides a review of recent research on the methods and impacts of UHI on building energy consumption, and the practical techniques that can be used to mitigate the adverse effects of UHI in China. The impact of UHI on building energy consumption depends largely on the local microclimate, the urban area features where the building is located, and the type and characteristics of the building. In the urban areas dominated by air conditioning, UHI could result in an approximately 10–16% increase in cooling energy consumption. Besides, the potential negative effects of UHI can be prevented from China in many ways, such as urban greening, cool material, water bodies, urban ventilation, etc. These strategies could have a substantial impact on the overall urban thermal environment if they can be used in the project design stage of urban planning and implemented on a large scale. Therefore, this study is useful to deepen the understanding of the physical mechanisms of UHI and provide practical approaches to fight the UHI for the urban planners, public health officials, and city decision-makers in China.

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Social Evaluation of Public Open Space Services and Their Impact on Well-Being: A Micro-Scale Assessment from a Coastal University

Sustainability ◽

10.3390/su13084372 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 13 (8) ◽

pp. 4372

Author(s):

Abdullah Addas ◽

Ahmad Maghrabi

Keyword(s):

Open Space ◽

Environmental Changes ◽

Positive Impact ◽

Well Being ◽

Social Evaluation ◽

Open Spaces ◽

Rapid Urbanization ◽

Public Open Space ◽

The Impact ◽

Public Open Spaces

Public open spaces services have been shown to be profoundly affected by rapid urbanization and environmental changes, and in turn, they have influenced socio-cultural relationships and human well-being. However, the impact of these changes on public open space services (POSS) remains unexplored, particularly in the Saudi Arabian context. This study examines the socio-cultural influence of POSS on the King Abdulaziz University campus, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and the impact of these services on well-being. A field survey and questionnaire were used to collect data. Non-parametric tests (Kruskal–Wallis and Mann–Whitney tests) were used to find significant differences in the importance of POSS as perceived by stakeholders based on socio-demographic attributes. Factor analysis was performed for 14 POSS to identify those that are most important. The study showed that (i) university stakeholders are closely linked to services provided by public open spaces (POS) and dependent on POSS, (ii) there were significant differences in the perceived importance of POSS according to gender, age, and social groups, and (iii) 70 to 90% of stakeholders reported POSS as having a positive impact on well-being. Thus, the findings will help design and plan POSS to meet the needs of society and promote well-being.

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Climate Change, Weather, Housing Precarity, and Homelessness: A Systematic Review of Reviews

International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health ◽

10.3390/ijerph18115812 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 18 (11) ◽

pp. 5812

Author(s):

Mariya Bezgrebelna ◽

Kwame McKenzie ◽

Samantha Wells ◽

Arun Ravindran ◽

Michael Kral ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Systematic Review ◽

Natural Disasters ◽

Green Infrastructure ◽

Temperature Extremes ◽

Weather Extremes ◽

Positive Effects ◽

Increased Risk ◽

Review Of Reviews ◽

The Impact

This systematic review of reviews was conducted to examine housing precarity and homelessness in relation to climate change and weather extremes internationally. In a thematic analysis of 15 reviews (5 systematic and 10 non-systematic), the following themes emerged: risk factors for homelessness/housing precarity, temperature extremes, health concerns, structural factors, natural disasters, and housing. First, an increased risk of homelessness has been found for people who are vulnerably housed and populations in lower socio-economic positions due to energy insecurity and climate change-induced natural hazards. Second, homeless/vulnerably-housed populations are disproportionately exposed to climatic events (temperature extremes and natural disasters). Third, the physical and mental health of homeless/vulnerably-housed populations is projected to be impacted by weather extremes and climate change. Fourth, while green infrastructure may have positive effects for homeless/vulnerably-housed populations, housing remains a major concern in urban environments. Finally, structural changes must be implemented. Recommendations for addressing the impact of climate change on homelessness and housing precarity were generated, including interventions focusing on homelessness/housing precarity and reducing the effects of weather extremes, improved housing and urban planning, and further research on homelessness/housing precarity and climate change. To further enhance the impact of these initiatives, we suggest employing the Human Rights-Based Approach (HRBA).

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Seasonal Variations of Daytime Land Surface Temperature and Their Underlying Drivers over Wuhan, China

Remote Sensing ◽

10.3390/rs13020323 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 13 (2) ◽

pp. 323

Author(s):

Liang Chen ◽

Xuelei Wang ◽

Xiaobin Cai ◽

Chao Yang ◽

Xiaorong Lu

Keyword(s):

Surface Temperature ◽

Land Surface Temperature ◽

Land Surface ◽

Vegetation Index ◽

Normalized Difference Vegetation Index ◽

Maximum Temperature ◽

Maximum Temperature Difference ◽

Rapid Urbanization ◽

The Impact ◽

The City

Rapid urbanization greatly alters land surface vegetation cover and heat distribution, leading to the development of the urban heat island (UHI) effect and seriously affecting the healthy development of cities and the comfort of living. As an indicator of urban health and livability, monitoring the distribution of land surface temperature (LST) and discovering its main impacting factors are receiving increasing attention in the effort to develop cities more sustainably. In this study, we analyzed the spatial distribution patterns of LST of the city of Wuhan, China, from 2013 to 2019. We detected hot and cold poles in four seasons through clustering and outlier analysis (based on Anselin local Moran’s I) of LST. Furthermore, we introduced the geographical detector model to quantify the impact of six physical and socio-economic factors, including the digital elevation model (DEM), index-based built-up index (IBI), modified normalized difference water index (MNDWI), normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), population, and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on the LST distribution of Wuhan. Finally, to identify the influence of land cover on temperature, the LST of croplands, woodlands, grasslands, and built-up areas was analyzed. The results showed that low temperatures are mainly distributed over water and woodland areas, followed by grasslands; high temperatures are mainly concentrated over built-up areas. The maximum temperature difference between land covers occurs in spring and summer, while this difference can be ignored in winter. MNDWI, IBI, and NDVI are the key driving factors of the thermal values change in Wuhan, especially of their interaction. We found that the temperature of water area and urban green space (woodlands and grasslands) tends to be 5.4 °C and 2.6 °C lower than that of built-up areas. Our research results can contribute to the urban planning and urban greening of Wuhan and promote the healthy and sustainable development of the city.

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Assessing the Impact of Urban Expansion on Surrounding Forested Landscape Connectivity across Space and Time

Land ◽

10.3390/land10040359 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 10 (4) ◽

pp. 359

Author(s):

Zhouqiao Ren ◽

Jianhua He ◽

Qiaobing Yue

Keyword(s):

Landscape Connectivity ◽

Urban Expansion ◽

Landscape Fragmentation ◽

Sustainable Urban Development ◽

Delayed Response ◽

Conservation Practices ◽

Rapid Urbanization ◽

Dynamic Landscapes ◽

The Impact ◽

Over Time

Landscape connectivity is important for all organisms as it directly affects population dynamics. Yet, rapid urbanization has caused serious landscape fragmentation, which is the primary contributor of species extinctions worldwide. Previous studies have mostly used spatial snap-shots to evaluate the impact of urban expansion on landscape connectivity. However, the interactions among habitats over time in dynamic landscapes have been largely ignored. Here, we demonstrated that overlooking temporal connectivity can lead to the overestimation of the impact of urban expansion. How much greater the overestimation is depends on the amount of net habitat loss. Moreover, we showed that landscape connectivity may have a delayed response to urban expansion. Our analysis shifts the way to understand the ecological consequences of urban expansion. Our framework can guide sustainable urban development and can be inspiring to conservation practices under other contexts (e.g., climate change).

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