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Spatial Pattern of Urban Green Infrastructure Matters for Urban Cooling and Environmental Injustice
Lingshan Li, Ursula Eicker, Carly Ziter, Angela Kross
‘Greening’ urban areas serves as an adaptation strategy to counteract the rising temperatures in urban areas associated with adverse impacts on human health and well-being. Efficient green space management is needed to get more ecosystem benefits due to the limited space in the urban area. To achieve this, a deeper understanding of the relationship between spatial patterns of urban green infrastructure (UGI) and their capacity to mitigate urban heat at different spatial scales is imperative. However, research on the effects of landscape structure on urban heat often focuses on a specific spatial scale (either at local scale or city scale, sometimes nation scale), while the effect of UGI can change across different scales. And studies on the spatial pattern of urban green infrastructure payed less attention on configuration aspect. Further, when assessing the demand of cooling service, people usually uses climate indicators instead of indicators from stake holders' side. Our research aims to fill in those gaps and address the following questions: How does the composition and configuration of UGI affect land surface temperature at different spatial scales? Are there mismatches in the supply and demand of urban heat mitigation service provided by UGI in terms of economic status and ethnic groups in Montreal? Our results showed that during the day, the aggregate tree clusters reduce more land surface temperatures than the discrete tree clusters, especially at larger spatial scale. Additionally, low income, less educated people and visible minorities are found to receive less cooling service provided by the UGI than they demand compared with high socioeconomic status people.
