Measuring urban green space in Australia

Posted on 26 Jan 2021
Updated on 26 Jan 2021
2-minute read

Developing a nationally consistent set of criteria for evaluating urban green space.

Park and path with Sydney city in background

As part of their Measuring Australia’s Green Space Asset project, Hort International asked ISF to produce a review of research into global urban green space measurement and engage with Australian stakeholders to gauge current practice.

Through extensive stakeholder engagement – 15 interviews and five focus groups across Australia – we identified strong interest in a nationally consistent urban green space decision-support framework. Stakeholder research also found that currently used urban green space measures matched the broad thematic grouping of urban green space measures found in literature such as: 1) Human Wellbeing & Liveability; 2) Ecosystem Management; 3) Vegetation Management; 4) Asset Management; and 5) Urban Planning.

When current Australian use of urban green space measures is compared with the scientific state of the art it can be seen that only a fraction of available measures and associated methods are currently being used – Human Wellbeing & Liveability was particularly underrepresented.

From our findings, we were able to develop a ‘blueprint’ for a nationally consistent urban green space decision-support framework. We then applied the framework to an Australian scenario (rapid assessment of urban green space assets using satellite imagery) as an example of the framework's capabilities.