Development of green space provision for housing estates at metropolitan scale: A spatiotemporal assessment of proximity in a rapidly urbanizing Chinese city during the last 10 years

Understanding urban green space (UGS) provision in relation to its proximity, amid rapid urbanization and increasing UGS construction, is crucial for sustainable urban development. This study introduces a population-weighted proximity index to analyze the supply, surplus, and deficits of UGS provision for residents, both inside and outside UGS access radii. We assessed spatiotemporal changes in UGS provision from 2012 to 2021 in Shanghai to identify areas lacking UGSs, planning irrationalities, and needs for new UGS construction. We calculated the priority locations for new UGSs, focusing on residents most in need yet situated outside UGS access radii. Based on these, we accordingly create detailed and specific UGS development proposals. The findings show that the UGS provision on proximity that residents actually obtained in Shanghai citywide has improved at the city, community, and neighborhood levels over the past 10 years. Shanghai has undergone a phase of increasing UGS construction, resulting in more residents, previously outside UGS access radii, now being within these areas. However, despite these developments, many residential locations within UGS access radii still face insufficient UGS provision. At the neighborhood level, large proximity UGS deficits, where residents are located out of an access radius, still need to be solved. At the city and community levels, large UGS deficits within access radii also need to be solved. The proximity deficits in most urgent need to be solved at any level are for residents located outside of a UGS access radius. We also find that many of the newly built UGSs, which were constructed to address the proximity deficits for residents located outside of an access radius at both the city and community levels, were not smartly or efficiently planned. In the future, more UGSs could be newly built at locations with optimal priorities according to the findings of this study to solve efficiently the proximity deficits for residents still located outside of a UGS access radius, and to improve UGS provision on proximity at all three levels.