Complex systems thinking approach to urban greenery to provide community‐tailored solutions and enhance the provision of cultural ecosystem services

Abstract

This paper presents a GIS‐based method for supporting local administrations in the design of urban green areas while taking into account the complexity of the whole system. The proposed method merges the criteria of availability, accessibility, attractiveness, usability, and suitability in a multi‐level approach (city, neighborhood green area) to assist in the selection of which services within green areas to enhance from those requested by citizens. The case study is an urban park in a medium‐sized Italian city (Perugia). The results demonstrate that the available urban green spaces amount to 34.7 m2 per person, but only 24% of citizens have adequate access to a green area providing at least an adequate level of service, and 18% of them are without access to any appropriately equipped green area. Furthermore, citizens have limited knowledge of their city’s urban green system as a whole. Indeed, 41% of the requested services were already available in other accessible green areas with attractive and readily available dedicated equipment. These areas were suggested as alternative solutions. To achieve a complex systems approach, our results suggest observing sim-ilar systems with various and adaptable scales and studying them as open networks composed of heterogeneous internal and external variables.