GRAS: A Spatial Decision Support System for Green Space Planning

Abstract

Green space is defined here as a vegetated public area in an urban setting that provides an open environment. Urban green spaces provide a number of benefits towards the overall goal of urban sustainability. Some of these benefits are more tangible than others (e.g. Heisler 1986; Randall et al. 2004). However, very little is known about the link between urban green space provision and human behaviour. There are surprisingly few published guidelines explaining how to assess the provision of green spaces on an intra-urban basis (e.g. Nicol and Blake 2000; Herzele and Wiedemann 2002). Projects on this field are in a premature stage, with current approaches just starting to explore the elaboration and application of choice experiments and contingent valuation techniques to explain the influence of green space on people's lives (Lawson 2000; Pozsgay and Bhat 2001; Bhat and Gossen 2002; Kemperman et al. 2005; Maat and de Vries 2006; Jim and Chen 2006). These are, however, isolated studies or ad hoc experiments rather than models or tools that can be explicitly used to support decisions on green space provision for public welfare.