As cities resume life in public space, they face the difficult task of retaining outdoor activity while decreasing exposure to airborne viruses, such as the novel coronavirus. Even though the transmission risk is higher in indoor spaces, recent evidence suggests that physical contact outdoors also contributes to an increased virus exposure. Given that streets constitute the largest percentage of public space in cities, there is an increasing need to prioritise their use to minimise transmission risk. However, city officials currently lack the assessment tools to achieve this. This article evaluates the extent to which street segments are associated with spatiotemporal variations of potential exposures of pedestrians to virus transmission. We develop a multi-component risk score that considers both urban form and human activity along streets over time, including (a) an assessment of pedestrian infrastructure according to the average width of pavements, (b) a measure of accessibility for each street based on its position in the street network, (c) an activity exposure score that identifies places along streets where exposure could be higher and (d) an estimate of the number of pedestrians that will pass through each street during weekdays and weekends. We use Amsterdam in the Netherlands as a case study to illustrate how our score could be used to assess the exposure of pedestrians to virus transmission along streets. Our approach can be replicated in other cities facing a similar challenge of bringing life back to the streets while minimising transmission risks.@en

The study of urban greenspaces typically relies on three types of data: people’s subjective perceptions collected via questionnaires, vegetation indices derived from satellite imagery, such as the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), and Land Use or Land Cover maps, such as OpenStreetMap (OSM). Data on people’s perceptions are essential when researching human activities, yet they scale poorly. NDVI and OSM data, on the other hand, are freely available worldwide, thus valuable for assessing cities at scale or prioritizing locations for interventions. However, it is unclear how effectively NDVI and OSM data capture people’s visual perceptions of urban greenspaces. In this work, we collect people’s visual perceptions of public spaces in three major European cities through crowdsourcing, quantitatively compare them to NDVI and OSM data, and qualitatively investigate disparities. We found that NDVI moderately correlates with perceived greenness and that not only OSM greenspaces but also pocket parks and play spaces are often considered green. Furthermore, we found that people’s perceptions correspond best to OSM data in small radius distances and NDVI data in larger radius distances and that combining NDVI and OSM data can improve identification of places in OSM that are commonly considered green. Our qualitative analysis revealed that configuration and variety of vegetation, and presence of other natural or built-up features, influence people’s perceptions of greenspace. With our findings we aim to help researchers and practitioners make more informed decisions when collecting greenspace data for their specific context, ultimately contributing to green urban environments that reflect people’s perspectives.@en

Recent evidence underscores the importance of greenspace exposure in promoting physical activity, and in having a positive impact on mental health and cognitive development. Accessibility has been identified to be the primary motivating factor when it comes to encouraging greenspace use and, correspondingly, exposure. Existing quantitative approaches to measuring greenspace accessibility predominantly focus on the areas surrounding home locations, often disregarding access from other settings such as schools or workplaces, exposures while on the move, and mobility differences among different population age groups. This article introduces a novel method to measure greenspace accessibility that considers access from different activity settings (i.e., homes, schools, and the commutes between them) for children and adolescents, while accounting for the dependency of human access on the road network. We use Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and The Hague in the Netherlands as case studies to illustrate the utility of our method. Compared to conventional measures of greenspace accessibility, we show that accounting for school and commuting settings, in addition to residences, captures previously untapped accessibility aspects for both children and adolescents. Our approach can be replicated in other cities worldwide, with the aspiration to provide planners and public health policy-makers with a methodological tool that can help in evaluating access and use of greenspaces when designing health-promoting interventions.@en

Accessible outdoor spaces for unsupervised play are important for children’s health. However, parents impose constraints based on their perception of safety, which can have a significant impact on which play spaces are actually accessible to children. Such constraints are not taken into account by widely adopted accessibility indicators that use generic radial buffers or travel distances. We introduce a child’s play accessibility metric, which measures the ease with which children can reach outdoor play spaces without supervision. We developed this metric through an iterative co-design process with experts on the built environment and children’s health, leveraging open data. Our metric considers traffic, natural barriers to children, and a range of playable spaces. It can be used by planners and policymakers to enable large-scale assessments of play space accessibility, identify associated equity issues, and benchmark progress toward healthier environments for all ages.@en

The configuration of public open spaces plays a crucial role in shaping how different people use them. Nevertheless, our understanding of how the physical features of public open spaces influence the activities conducted within them, and the extent to which this impact differs across various individuals and population groups, is currently limited. In this study, we explore how the physical characteristics of public open spaces influence the likelihood of use among individuals, spanning different age and gender groups. By employing crowdsourcing, street-level imagery, statistical comparisons, and reflexive thematic analysis we uncover significant variations in the suitability of public open spaces for distinct activities, such as socializing or exercising. Greenspaces emerge as the preferred choice for almost all activities, whereas streets are consistently rated as the least suitable. Additionally, we identified various characteristics that influence the activities people are likely to engage in. These include the size of the space, the presence of seating, natural elements such as vegetation or water bodies, and the proximity to transport infrastructure. Surprisingly, we do not observe statistically significant differences in preferences among most age and gender groups. Overall, our study underscores the need for providing a diverse range of public open spaces tailored to accommodate different individuals, population groups, and activities.@en