Study on the equity of urban green space: Origin, progress, and enlightenment

Abstract

Urban green space equity focuses on whether different social groups can equally share the well-being from green space, which is an important issue in the realm of environmental justice. We systematically introduced the origin and development of green space equity, explored its multidimensional progress in conceptual connotation, measurement methodology, phenomenon, mechanism, and regulation, and proposed the enlightenment for deepening the related studies. The green space equity originated from environmental social movement and environmental justice studies, and experienced multilevel evolution in topic constriction and theoretical interpretation. Although the connotation of green space equity was interpreted from various perspectives, its core idea was distributional equality. There was a frequently-used framework for measurement methodology of green space equity, whose spatial scale issue was critical. Due to the differences of characteristics, developmental stages, and institutional backgrounds between Chinese and Western cities, the phenomena and driving mechanisms of green space equity were different. The regulation strategies of green space equity could be summarized into three types, including green distributional equitable strategy, social recognitional justice strategy, and procedural justice orientated strategy. Future studies should deepen the research from the hierarchical logics for practice management, the fine-scale measurement methodology, the interpretation of mechanism for green space inequity in Chinese context, and simulation of differentiated regulation strategies. Social development endows green space equity with more practical tasks and theoretical logics, which is urgent to clarify the research progress to support the future research.

Keywords: environmental justice; equity; green space; progress; urban ecology.