Assessing City Green Spaces by Voluntary Geographic Information

Alexander V. Ignatyev

, Mikhail A. Kulikov

and Danila S. Parygin

Volgograd State Technical University, Volgograd, Russia

Keywords: Geoinformation technologies, geoinformation systems, GIS, planting, environment, living environment

quality index, territory improvement, environmental comfort of living.

Abstract: Green spaces are one of the most important indicators of the urban environment quality. The quantitative

information on the green areas is necessary for the calculation of a total index of the urban environment quality

submitted annually to the government statistics bodies. Such information can also be obtained by means of

geoinformation systems that provide multiple opportunities of their application in this area: map generating,

data base building, information actualization. The article considers the application of voluntary geographic

information from the web-cartographic project OpenStreetMap (OSM) and the GIS technology to assess the

area of the city greenery. The authors provide an example for the use of the geoinformation system with an

open code QGIS to calculate the areas of green spaces in Volgograd. The application of the method suggested

allows significantly reducing the time and labor effort to obtain the indicators of urban environment planting.

1 INTRODUCTION

The increased technogenic action on the environment

caused the need for more sustainable design and

construction processes. Environmentally sound

architectural and construction solutions at all the

stages of a life cycle the city passes as a whole system

are the essential prerequisite of urban development

(Shadrina, 2009; Usacheva, 2017; Sidorenko, 2020;

Ignatyev, 2020; Ignatyev, 2020).

Although the urban environment development

was included into key strategic development areas of

Russia, only a third part of Russian cities were

considered comfortable by the Minstroy RF

information. Thus, in 2019 the Decree of the

Government of the Russian Federation approved the

Method for Formation of Urban Environment Quality

(March 23, 2019 No. 510-r). This method

distinguished 6 spaces, and one of them is titled

“Green spaces”. A total of three criteria were

established for its assessment:

1. A share of public green spaces of a total

greenery area (%): it allows assessing the level

of comfort and safety of such green spaces in

general and natural planting in the city.

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0733-8808

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2. The planting level (%) which allows assessing

the potential development of the public green

areas as well as improving the environmental

safety of citizens considering the main

properties of greenery (dust, noise and CO2

attenuation, and oxygen release, sewage water

filtration, etc.)

3. Greenery state (non-dimensional share).

The improvement of indicators on these criteria

allows enhancing the assessment of the area “Green

spaces”.

While the greenery state shall be assessed after the

visual inspection alone, to obtain two other criteria

one may use geoinformation systems (GIS).

Although the idea of geoinformation system

application for assessing the planting level is not

original (the results of their application to solve these

tasks have been assessed by a few authors (Goryaeva,

2015; Ivlieva, 2010; Cavajos, 2011; Popova, 2018;

Sergeeva, 2021), in general, no uniform and generally

accepted method for the assessment of city green

spaces has been developed.

The research covered the endeavor to develop a

method for assessing the city green spaces based on

the voluntary geographic information from the web-

Ignatyev, A., Kulikov, M. and Parygin, D.

Assessing City Green Spaces by Voluntary Geographic Information.

DOI: 10.5220/0011555500003524

In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Methods, Models, Technologies for Sustainable Development (MMTGE 2022) - Agroclimatic Projects and Carbon Neutrality, pages

103-108

ISBN: 978-989-758-608-8

 2023 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. Under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

103

cartographic project OpenStreetMap (OSMN)

exemplified by Volgograd. The ultimate purpose is to

optimize the process of obtaining the urban planting

indicators.

2 MATERIALS AND METHODS

To get the data on the green spaces in Volgograd, the

authors used voluntary geographic information (VGI)

from OpenStreetMap (OSM) (Alhamwi, 2017;

Ballatore, 2012; Briem, 2019; Brinkhoff, 2016;

Estima, 2013; Fritz, 2012; Gil, J., 2015; Mobasheri,

2017; Ludwig, 2021).

The OSM formal model includes a range of

properties (referred to as tags) describing the

geographic classes the use of which is defined by the

project participants at the special website Wiki. Each

mapped object is assigned a tag which unites a key

and its meaning.

The research work (Ignatyev, 2021) already

provided the study of tags used in OpenStreetMap to

designate greenery.

However, it turned out we did not select enough

“key-meaning” pairs to identify all greenery in

Volgograd.

After additional study conducted for the OSM

tags we obtained the following pairs:

− landuse = grass, surface = grass, and natural =

grassland – grass lawns;

− landuse = meadow, natural = heath and natural

= scrub – territories with scrubs;

− natural = wood and landuse = forest –

territories with trees;

− landuse = recreation_ground - green spaces for

public leisure except for parks;

− landuse = allotments – land lots allocated for

gardens or farmlands;

− leisure =- park – parks;

− natural = wetland - other greenery.

To unload the information on the green objects in

Volgograd from the cartographic service

OpenStreetMap and its further processing, we used a

free geoinformation system with an open code QGIS.

The research was conducted in several stages.

To unload the information on Volgograd with its

boundaries and green objects from the cartographic

service OpenStreetMap, we used the module

QuickOSM.

To unload the information on Volgograd with its

boundaries, we used the tag with the key admin_level

and the value 6.

Figure 1: Vector layers for green objects, Volgograd.

MMTGE 2022 - I International Conference "Methods, models, technologies for sustainable development: agroclimatic projects and carbon

neutrality", Kadyrov Chechen State University Chechen Republic, Grozny, st. Sher

104

Using the abovementioned tags, we unloaded and

saved the information on all green objects in

Volgograd in the form of a permanent layer (Fig. 1).

The table of each layer attributes was added a

calculated field area intended for storing the area

value of each polygon.

After that we cleared all the data and deleted the

objects with zero area values.

Further, the layers obtained were united by the

specific greenery types (Fig. 2).

These layers were united into the layer “All green

spaces”.

Using this layer, we generated a heat map of

greenery distribution (Fig. 3). In the process of its

generation the points were weighed on the field area,

Figure 2: Layers with specific greenery types, Volgograd.

Figure 3: Heat map of greenery distribution, Volgograd.

Assessing City Green Spaces by Voluntary Geographic Information

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i.e., on the polygon areas containing the information

on the green spaces.

To obtain information on the distribution of

apartment blocks and the number people living there,

we used the data unloaded from the service Reforma

ZhKKh (Housing and Utility Reform) presented in

the csv format. This file contains variable data on the

apartment blocks located in Volgograd including

their addresses, coordinates and the number of people

living there.

The thorough analysis of the file showed that

some of the blocks have no data on their residents’

number.

This flaw was eliminated. We calculated those 26

square meters is an average living space per a person

living in the apartment block in Volgograd. Using this

value, we added the missing information to the field

containing the data on the number of residents in the

apartment blocks.

The availability of coordinates allowed mapping

these blocks onto QGIS as a dot layer shown in Figure

Figure 4: A dot layer with the apartment blocks location,

Volgograd.

3 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The software solution we obtained allows calculating

the following indicators used to get the index of urban

environment quality:

1. The general city area (Fig. 5) applied to

calculate the criterion “Planting level”.

Figure 5: The general area calculated, Volgograd.

2. The area of city territories covered by greenery

(Fig. 6) applied to calculate the criteria

“Planting level” and the “Share of public green

spaces of a total greenery area”.

Figure 6: The calculated area of city spaces covered by

greenery, Volgograd.

3. The area of public spaces (Fig. 7) applied to

calculate the criterion “Share of public green

spaces of a total greenery area”.

Figure 7: The calculated area of public spaces, Volgograd.

Additionally, as the solution developed allows

calculating a total area of spaces covered by each type

of greenery, it can be applied for unveiling the

potential improvement of green spaces. For example,

Figure 8 showed the area of so-called urban forests

that can be improved and included in the category of

the area of public spaces.

Figure 8: The area of urban forests, Volgograd.

MMTGE 2022 - I International Conference "Methods, models, technologies for sustainable development: agroclimatic projects and carbon

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Figure 9: The aligned heat map of greenery distribution and the layer of apartment block location, and the layer showing

Volgograd boundaries.

To add more, by aligning the heat map of greenery

distribution with the layer of apartment block location

(Fig. 9), one can define residential areas that should

be provided the access to green spaces in the first

place.

4 CONCLUSIONS

It is the first time the voluntary geographic

information from the web-cartographic project

OpenStreetMap was applied for Volgograd to assess

the area of city green spaces. The method suggested

allows using these data to calculate indicators for

obtaining the criteria “Planting level”, “Share of

public green spaces of a total greenery area” used to

get the index of the urban environment quality.

As the solution developed allows calculating a

total area of spaces covered by each type of greenery,

it can be applied for unveiling the potential

improvement of green spaces.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The study has been supported by the grant from the

Russian Science Foundation (RSF) No. 22-11-20024,

https://rscf.ru/en/project/22-11-20024/, and the

Volgograd Oblast. The authors express gratitude to

colleagues from the Department of Digital

Technologies for Urban Studies, Architecture and

Civil Engineering, VSTU involved in the

development of the project.

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