‘Just Green Enough’ in Urban Renewal: A Multifunctional and Pragmatic Approach in Realizing Multiscale Urban Green Space Optimization in Built-Up Residential Areas

Urban green space (UGS) plays an essential role in sustainable urban development and is closely related to public health and human well-being. The unevenly distributed UGSs in cities raise the issue of green justice. These exposed inequalities are expected to widen if no action is taken to support the most disadvantaged populations, especially with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Although previous studies have examined UGS distributional justice between social groups, they seldom consider the relationships between spatial patterns and UGS equity for the heterogeneity of built-up residential types in the city, not to mention how to place the pragmatic design and implement a strategy to explore green injustice for vulnerable neighborhoods. To address this gap, our study adopts a cascade of three methodological stages: 1) applying an urban morphological spatial pattern analysis (MSPA) to compare urban UGS patterns and the UGS-adapted Gini coefficient to measure the spatial equity of UGS distributions in three local built-up areas, 2) adopting the mathematical model and ‘Just green enough’ strategy into the redistribution of UGSs for the vulnerable neighborhood and at the same time to avoid inequality associated with green gentrification, and 3) exploring an integrated design and implementation method for the newly added UGSs that can accommodate both normal time and epidemic periods under China’s signature COVID Zero policy. The results indicate that there is a strong correlation between socioeconomic status and the distributional justice of UGSs among built-up types, while vulnerable people living in the densest residential neighborhoods have lower UGS provisions. All three built-up types share similarities in the characteristics of spatial patterns and have a tendency to decrease from core to edge, branch, and islet. As a significant finding for the support of UGS network planning inside neighborhoods, our study reveals relatively poor internal UGS connectivity in these three subdivisions. This paper thus provides a multifunctional and pragmatic approach for realizing multiscale UGS optimization by exploring it at the subdivision and neighborhood scales, respectively. It can also help guide decision-makers and planners to understand the complex interplay between existing social vulnerabilities, gentrification, and urban greening, thus formulating effective policies and hands-on strategies to address green injustice in sustainable urban renewal.